Proposed by Conservative MP and former whip David Maclean, the
Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill is at the top of the list
of private members' bills to be read this Friday in one of 13 five
hour windows in the Parliamentary calendar.
The Bill had a reading last Friday at which a handful of MPs who
opposed it 'talked out' the proposal by speaking on it for the full
five hours, preventing it from proceeding to the next stage.
But according to a spokesman for Parliament, because the Bill
has passed the committee stage and is the furthest progressed of
all the Bills in the queue for time, it will move to the top of the
queue and is likely to be the first bill to be read this
Friday.
There is another private member's bill which could progress past
the committee stage and would thus leap ahead of Maclean's, because
his has already had a reading in the House of Commons.
The Bill had its second reading on 19th January and was
unopposed. Time had run out on previous bills, and in this case the
remaining bills are called out. Any MP who objects at that point
shouts 'object' and the bill cannot proceed to the next stage on
that day.
No MP objected at the second reading of the Bill, so it was
taken as read without debate and it proceeded to committee
stage.
The Public Bill Committee heard the Bill and amended it on 7th
February. At that hearing Maclean defended his controversial
Bill.
"I take the view that when we write on behalf of constituents or
when a constituent comes to us we must be able to look them in the
eye and say that in all circumstances, what they tell us will not
get out – it is like a relationship with a priest," he told the
Committee. "We will write to an authority with their problem but we
guarantee that that information will not be leaked by us or get
into the public domain."
"I would not be able to function properly in fighting for my
constituents if I could not give them a guarantee that when I write
to the tax credit people or the Child Support Agency on their
behalf, no one else will see what they have said. Of course we must
have the right to do that," he said.
Critics of the Bill say that it makes a mockery of the FOI Act
by putting the very people who created the law out of its
reach.
One of the opponents of the Bill, Simon Hughes of the Liberal
Democrats, said last week: "It would be extremely bad politics and
extremely bad law for us at this stage - when parliament is hardly
the most well regarded institution in the land – to seek to exempt
the Commons and the Lords from the FOI Act. The public want to know
what we are doing and in particular they want to know how we spend
money on their behalf. It would be regarded as beyond acceptable if
we said you can't know some or all of the information about what we
do."
Maclean said in Feburary that his proposal was not a blanket ban
on FOI requests. "This does not apply to us as Members of
Parliament writing to a local authority complaining about our own
community charge or a personal matter. It does not apply to Members
of Parliament writing as Ministers in their ministerial capacity.
It relates purely to us as Members of Parliament in our official
capacity dealing with public authorities," he said.
But Maclean conceded that the kind of constituent information
whose protection he sought was, in fact, already covered by an
exemption in the FOI Act. "Theoretically there are provisions in
the current Act which may protect that correspondence, but we are
not the final arbiter on that. That decision may be made by someone
else who decides that it is safe to release our correspondence," he
said.
Conservative MP Peter Luff challenged Maclean at the February
Committee hearing, pointing out that section 40(2) already protects
the personal information of identifiable constituents.
Maclean admitted that the protection was already there but said
there could be problems with third party authorities not complying
with the Act.
"Clearly if one writes to a public authority and gives the
personal details of a constituent, such as their CSA [Child Support
Agency] claim, information relating to their children and so on,
that information should be protected. It should quite clearly be
protected under the current Act. However, inadvertently, someone
may release it," he said.
