Brooke, Ashcroft and the FoI
Oh, the irony of it …
As dramatised in the BBC4 programme “On Expenses” broadcast a week ago, although the “Daily Telegraph” did a brilliant job in exposing the scandal of MPs’ expenses, this came only after years of effort by the tireless American-born campaigner Heather Brooke. In fact, the BBC itself – for which Brooke once worked – had been on the receiving end of her campaigning when, after two years of pressure, she used the Freedom of Information Act to force the corporation to publish minutes of the Board of Governors’ meeting at which Director-General Greg Dyke was dismissed.
One of the fascinating features of “On Expenses” was that it reminded us that MPs had actually tried to exempt themselves from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act and were opposed in this effort by peers in the House of Lords.
Then yesterday, after 10 years of obfuscation, Tory Lord Ashcroft finally admitted what has been suspected ever since he was made a peer on the express undertaking that he would become a UK resident and therefore presumably pay full UK taxes. He never became a “permanent resident” (just a “long-term resident”) so that he has avoided the extra tax liability while funding the Conservatives to the tune of almost £7M in the last decade.
And what brought about this confession? A sudden commitment to transparency? An accumulation of embarrassment? No, you guessed it – as explained in this article, it was all to due with the Freedom of Information Act.
Ashcroft’s statement was designed to pre-empt the release by the Cabinet Office – in response to an FOI request – of the promise he made to allow him to take a seat in the Lords in 2000. But his statement made no reference to the pressure of the FoI request, or the deeply critical verdict of the Information Commissioner, who accused the Tory leadership of being “evasive and obfuscatory”. Instead he implied he had independently decided to release the details to avoid his affairs “distracting” from the election.
And who made this troubling FoI request. Well, what do you know? It was a member of the House of Commons, that same chamber that once considered exempting parliamentarians from the provisions of the Act. To his credit, the Labour MP Gordon Prentice has been pursuing the matter tenaciously.
When the dust has settled on the legacy of the Blair/Brown governments, constitutional reform will be seen to have been a major achievement and the Freedom of Information Act, in its own way, has changed things for ever. But it still needs campaigners like Heather Brooke and Gordon Prentice to use the Act and not give up.