Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean) for speaking to his Bill. I want to deal with his points first. He made both a broad point and a slightly narrower point. On the broad point, there are, of course, some hon. Members who are opposed to the Bill. The right hon. Gentleman has been a Member of this House as long as I have, so he knows that we have two ways of making arguments: on Second and Third Reading, we argue about a Bill as a whole; and in Committee and on Report, we try to make a Bill as least problematic and least offensive as possible, by improving it. The amendments in this particular case are designed to restrict the scope of this part of the Bill. The right hon. Gentleman rightly and kindly acknowledged that: I am grateful to him and would expect no less. On the narrower point that the right hon. Gentleman made, he followed up the question put to him by the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick). I cannot believe that the right hon. Gentleman believes it credible, however good our practice as a result of our own choice led by Mr. Speaker—who absolutely represents the views of Members on the House of Commons Commission as well as his own views—to say that we should be able to make own choices while everyone else has to follow laws that we impose on them. That is the issue. We list that every public Government Department must do what we tell them. We say that the Welsh Assembly must do what we tell it. We say that the Northern Ireland Assembly must do what we tell it. We say that the armed forces of the Crown—with the exception of the special forces, which have to act to protect national security—must do what we tell them. Yet the Bill is effectively saying that we must not be governed by the same law, which some of us find unacceptable. However good our practice—this point relates to what the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) said—it is presently Members of Parliament who are driving what information is available. As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, we can question the Leader of the House. We can also question the person who speaks for the House of Commons Commission—currently my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey). We can question orally and in writing. We can read the reports that the Commission produces. Other bodies such as the Members Estimate Committee are also relevant. All those matters are driven by Members of Parliament and I have listed things that we can do. However, as it happens, the tribunal case was brought by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), but also by someone who was not an MP. The question is about whether people other than MPs can ask the difficult questions. For very obvious reasons, there may be people other than MPs who are prepared to ask questions that we are not willing to ask. It is no great secret that the person responsible for Members’ standards in the House who was in post before the current occupant was regarded by some colleagues as over-zealous. Her contract was not renewed. I do not know whether she wanted it to be renewed, but there was common talk about not renewing it for her. The reality is that she was an external watchdog. The law is an external watchdog. The right hon. Gentleman, however, suggests that it is sufficient for us to drive our own agenda and that we should achieve by our own deliberations what the amendments are designed to achieve through legislative provision. I do not accept that that is sufficient. I do not question the motives of colleagues. I do not doubt that we will diligently seek to be more and more open. I hope that that is the case, but as we always say about Government legislation—the right hon. Gentleman says it as much as I do—the reason why we want provisions built directly into Bills is that we cannot guarantee that the next Government, the next Minister or the next Secretary of State will be as diligent, assiduous or open-minded as the present one. I do not think that the guarantee suggested by the right hon. Gentleman will work.