Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill

I am grateful, as always, for your guidance, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I concede that there are hundreds of examples, but in the light of your comments I will not outline them to the House today. To summarise the point that I was making and to conclude this section of my contribution, the exemption in the Bill—which some seek to put into law and which the amendments in this group seek to negate—for MPs’ correspondence with public authorities would allow Members of Parliament to present different faces at local level and national level. That is also a reason why the exemption is unhelpful. Members of Parliament should be made to make a choice and should be clear where they stand. It is key to whether we are seen to be accountable that members of the public in our constituencies are able to access letters that we have written to public authorities on important matters. Where the matters are inherently sensitive, they will, of course, fall within the scope of the existing exemption in the same way as normal. The Bill would mean that correspondence would be protected regardless of its sensitivity. That cannot possibly be right. Moving on to a new point, having taken your strictures to heart, Mr. Deputy Speaker—painful though it may be—I also wonder why the correspondence of Members of Parliament should enjoy special protection that is not available to correspondence from other sources. There is no special protection for communications to a public authority from, say, a local councillor. Local councillors are elected at various levels, including, of course, the London assembly level. They have constituents, as we do, and they take on issues on behalf of their constituents. They have their representational role, as we do. In many ways, their roles in public life mirror what we do. They have a role in creating the framework for action in their council and they have a role in looking after individual constituents. If the correspondence of Members of Parliament is exempted, why should that exemption not apply to local councillors in the same way? However, there is no suggestion that local councillors should be dealt with in that way. There is no suggestion that Members of the Welsh Assembly, Members of the Scottish Parliament, or anyone in the Northern Ireland Assembly should be dealt with in that way—or anyone in the London assembly, or any other elected public body in this country, all of which have their democratic mandate and constituents with whom they deal, and all of which interact on a daily basis with public bodies of various sorts. So what is so special about the House of Commons that we have to exempt MPs’ correspondence in that way? It gives out a double-edged message—a message that we create the law for somebody else and do something else ourselves. That is an extremely unattractive message. It risks our being seen by the public at large as hypocritical and it does not command public support. If we are going to provide a special exemption for Members of Parliament, there needs to be a pretty good reason for it, and so far no such reason has been brought forward. I mentioned local councillors. The same thing might apply to NHS chief executives—