Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill

I hope you accept that I was responding to an intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am in some difficulty because amendment No. 1 goes to the heart of the Bill, so it is necessary to explain, as I was trying to do, the general importance of freedom of information and the consequences for the House of exempting itself, which is what we want to reverse through amendment No. 1. If that exemption is not reversed, it will bring the consequences that I had begun to explain to the House. I have already mentioned that MPs would be brought into disrepute and the allegation that we would be seen as hypocritical, but there are other consequences. In the House, we are keen to ensure that public authorities take freedom of information legislation seriously. I am sure that many Members have used the legislation to make inquiries, whether of the Environment Agency, local councils or whatever. We expect those bodies to respond fully and properly. Unfortunately, it will be more difficult for us to do our job and persuade those authorities to respond fully and properly under the Act if we have exempted ourselves from it. That would send out the message, ““You must do one thing, we will do something else?, which would bring the whole Freedom of Information Act into disrepute. It would fatally undermine it and could extinguish the candle flame that was lit not long ago. The Bill has enormous ramifications that go way beyond the narrow terms of MPs’ expenses—important though they may be in their own small way. By reversing the assumption that the House of Commons and the House of Lords would be exempt from freedom of information legislation, amendment No. 1 would address a further consequence of the measure, to which I referred in an intervention, and which relates to the Information Commissioner. The commissioner was appointed under the Freedom of Information Act and he is doing a rather good job, although he has insufficient resources to deal with all the matters brought before him. He has given careful consideration to MPs’ expenses, covered in amendment No. 9, and to the general position of the House of Commons, covered in amendment No. 1. My application, to which I shall refer shortly, was a test case so it was given close scrutiny by the Information Commissioner. It then received close scrutiny from the information tribunal, which looked at all the arguments, including those we have heard from the hon. Member for Walsall, North and my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey today. The tribunal considered carefully the relationship between data protection and freedom of information. However, if we rejected amendments Nos. 1 and 9, we would be saying that the person appointed under the Freedom of Information Act and the information tribunal—the properly established body set up to assess appeals—can be overridden by a Back-Bench Bill that had no time on Second Reading, spent only one hour in Committee and is now being dealt with on a Friday morning, not in Government time. To override the commissioner and the tribunal discredits them in the eyes of the public; they would be unable to do their job properly. Their writ would be overridden if they could be knocked aside by Members of Parliament in this faulty process. I do not think that we really want to undermine the Information Commissioner or the information tribunal, but that will be the consequence if the Bill is not amended by amendments Nos. 1 and 9, tabled by my hon. Friend and me and Members on both sides of the House. It is worth pointing out that the amendments are supported not merely by two Liberal Democrat Members, but by a Conservative Member, a Labour Member and a Plaid Cymru Member.