Freedom of Information Act 2000

Lord Armstrong of Ilminster Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Armstrong of Ilminster]

My Lords, I am glad to be contributing to this short debate initiated by my noble friend and former adversary Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield. I say “former adversary”, because when he was the Whitehall correspondent of the Times and I was the Principal Private Secretary at 10 Downing Street, I was required by my political masters to see that Whitehall did all it could to frustrate his knavish tricks, designed to extract information about the working of government which government would have preferred not to disclose. He collected nuggets of information with indefatigable diligence, like Squirrel Nutkin collected nuts, but, unlike Squirrel Nutkin, he always knew where he had stored his nuggets and where to find them when he needed them.

Now that the noble Lord is no longer a mischievous journalist but a learned professor, and I am a mandarin long since put out to grass, we are firm friends. I can acknowledge that, though he did not win them all, he did win more than we could have wished, and that much of what he succeeded in extracting was relatively harmless if occasionally a little embarrassing.

I am much in favour, and always have been, of the greatest degree of transparency in government as is reasonably possible. That is owed by government, central and local, to Parliament and to the councils to which they are accountable, and to the people they represent. But freedom of information is not, at least in its current legislative form, an unmitigated boon and blessing to men. Tony Blair expressed the point in his memoirs in his own characteristically vivid style:

“You idiot”—

he says, addressing himself—

“You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop”—

his words, not mine—

“I quake at the imbecility of it”.

“It” is the Freedom of Information Act. He goes on:

“Where was Sir Humphrey when I needed him? We had legislated in the first throes of power. How could you—

“you” is now Sir Humphrey, I think—

“knowing what you know, have allowed us to do such a thing so utterly undermining of sensible government?”

It is a well attested fact that, if I was the model for anyone, it was for Sir Arnold Robinson, not for Sir Humphrey Appleby. None the less, I am sorry that I was not around to be consulted in Mr Blair’s hour of need. I was already, unfortunately, well into my retirement.

I am afraid that there is no doubt that the risk of unwarrantable disclosure created by the Freedom of Information Act is liable to be damaging to the quality of governance. My successor, the noble Lord, Lord O'Donnell, has gone on record with his anxieties about the threat that the Freedom of Information Act presents to the usefulness of the minutes of the meetings of the Cabinet. Those minutes are not a verbatim record; they are none the less a comprehensive and accurate account of what the Cabinet decides and why. They are a valuable tool of administration. Their value depends upon their comprehensiveness and their accuracy. Their value would be diminished—they could even be misleading—if they had to be edited or bowdlerised to minimise risks of unacceptable disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

More generally, Ministers and officials, and indeed other people, now hesitate to put in writing things which are important, and which ought to be conveyed to their readers, but which they would not want to see having to be disclosed in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. The result is not only that discussion among colleagues is less candid than it should be but also that policy decisions may be taken on inadequate information.

The perverse effect of freedom of information legislation is thus to make important information less freely available where it is most needed and to impair the quality of governance. This is a problem that may well need to be addressed by amending legislation if its effects are not to become cumulatively more damaging.

I just add my support for the programme of official histories and my hope that the Minister will be able to assure the House that, despite the need for austerity in public spending, the programme will be maintained.