Supplementary written evidence submitted
by Nick Davies, the Guardian
The immediate source of the invoices which I
passed to the committee on 14 July was my Guardian colleague Rob
Evans. In October 2007, he gave me a collection of some 60 sheets
of paper, made up of claims submitted by Steve Whittamore to various
media groups and also of invoices recording payments by some of
those groups to Whittamore. All of the sheets had been redacted
to remove the names and any other details of any individual who
was mentioned. The News International invoices which I passed
to the committee were among them.
Rob Evans is the Guardian's specialist in the use
of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain internal documents
from public bodies, and I understood that he had obtained this
redacted paperwork by using the Act.
Since receiving your letter, I have spoken to
him and established that what actually happened was that he did
not have to use the Act: the ICO press office volunteered to supply
him with this collection of redacted paperwork in December 2006
when he was preparing a news story about What Price Privacy Now?
He recalls being invited to the ICO for a briefing with the then
commissioner, Richard Thomas, and then the press office biking
the material to him at the Guardian office on the following day.
He says there is no suggestion that this was an unauthorised move
by the press office: on the contrary, he says, this was what the
ICO wanted.
I am sorry if my assumption about the use of
the Act caused any confusion. The important point, I think, is
that Rob is clear and certain that the ICO was the source of the
paperwork.
It is interesting that the ICO now take the
view that it could be unlawful to release this paperwork. I know
there has been a lot of debate within the ICO about whether to
publish more Motorman paperwork and it may be that the supposed
legal obstacles are not quite as great as they are sometimes perceived
to be.
August 2009
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