Last year, the Government published its consultation paper on the so-called Entitlement Cards. In April this year, Beverley Hughes, Minister for Citizenship and Immigration told the House of Commons, "We are at the moment making a detailed assessment of the 2,000 responses received". She added that these responses "have been about 2:1 in favour of introducing a scheme."
Privacy International wrote to the Government on 2nd May, asking the method by which the number of responses was calculated. Its issue was that there seemed to be some discrepancy in both the figures and the opinions.
Stand.org.uk, a site that campaigns "for safe e-commerce legislation," reported that 5,029 of its visitors submitted comments to the Entitlement Cards Unit using the site's consultation service, the overwhelming majority of which were opposed to the proposal, and another 798 individuals submitted comments (257 in favour, 541 against) using a voicemail system.
So Privacy International asked the obvious questions: were these responses received? And if so, why were they not included in the numbers cited by Beverley Hughes?
Privacy International approached the Government by lodging a formal request to the Home Office under the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information. The group had previously been informally notified by Home Office officials that a decision had been made to "collapse" the 6,000 responses into one or two by treating them as a single petition. Understandably, the group wanted to know why.
Despite a clear undertaking by civil servants to provide a response to the request by 2nd June, a Home Office official telephoned Privacy International's director, Simon Davies, yesterday. The message was that the request had been rejected outright.
The justification given was that Conservative MP Anne McIntosh had lodged a Question on Notice relating to a part of the Open Government request. The Home Office claimed that to provide Privacy International with information would amount to a breach of Parliamentary procedure.
But as Simon Davies points out, the Open Government Code contains no mention of Parliamentary procedure constituting grounds for exemption from the Code.
"The Government's refusal to provide this information makes a mockery of its commitment to Open Government, and it makes a mockery of this consultation" said Davies.
Anne McIntosh's question (which was scheduled for reply on 3rd June, but which appears to remain unanswered) involved only one element of the Privacy International request.
The MP had asked only for the number and preferences of responses sent through the stand.org.uk portal.
Privacy International had requested an overall and much wider spectrum of information relating to the method by which the number of responses was calculated, any analysis of the responses, whether the telephone responses were counted and a justification for any refusal to count particular communications as individual responses.
"To reject our request for information in these circumstances is as justifiable as refusing data on the national birth rate because an MP had lodged a question about empty beds in a maternity ward" said Davies.
"The Home Office has arbitrarily and improperly rejected this legitimate request", he continued. "The government knows that 80% of the responses had opposed an ID card, yet it continues to use deceptive and duplicitous tactics to perpetuate the myth that the consultation was a victory for the proposal".
"Throughout this entire process the conduct of the Home Office has been disgraceful. They materially breached the code of conduct on consultations, they lied about the figures, and now they have shamelessly flouted the Open Government code. In terms of barefaced arrogance I have never seen anything quite like it."
Privacy International's complaint on the consultation breaches is at:
www.privacyinternational.org/issues/
idcard/uk/omb-complaint-103.html
