Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Lord Wills and Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Thursday 12th January 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, when I tabled these amendments I thought they were typically uncontentious, modest little amendments that would not detain the House for very long. However, having heard the previous debate on Amendments 151E and 151F they seem to be perhaps slightly more significant than I first thought because, in trying to tackle problems of delay, they could help resolve the clearly difficult and contentious issue of the risk register. I hope the Government will look at these amendments sympathetically, not only for their own sake but also as a way of resolving the difficult issues raised in the previous debate. All three amendments seek to tackle the problem of undue delay in complying with freedom of information requests. I was the Freedom of Information Minister twice in my political life in the other place and this issue came up over and over again as a real problem. These delays are not necessarily malign but there is a problem with delays in the system. Therefore this is an attempt to go round it and put new controls in place.

Amendment 151L imposes a time limit for decisions involving the public interest test and limits the possible extension of the 20-working-day limit to a further 20 working days so that a response would have to be provided no later than 40 working days after the request. In general, authorities must respond to FOI requests promptly and in any event within 20 working days, but where an authority considers whether to disclose exempt information on public interest grounds it can extend that 20-day period by,

“such time as is reasonable in the circumstances”.

There is no maximum period to this permitted extension.

In some cases—not all—the delay is necessary and is there for very good reasons, but in other cases extensions have been repeatedly claimed, leading to delays of more than a year before freedom of information requests have been answered. This clearly is unacceptable. It is unacceptable if these delays are the result of the incompetence of officials—and, indeed, Ministers, where they are involved—not getting their act together in time and just putting things off. It is even less acceptable if the result of delay is to save the Government of the day some sort of political embarrassment. This is not unknown in government and it is not acceptable. The amendment is in line with the Information Commissioner’s guidance which states that normally an extension should not be needed at all, but where it is the extension should not exceed a further 20 working days.

Amendment 151M requires every public authority to produce as part of its publication scheme an annual report setting out the number of requests it has received and the number with which it has complied within the statutory time limits. This information would have to be provided for requests made under both the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations. As I said earlier, the Ministry of Justice provides such information quarterly for central government bodies. There is no requirement for other bodies to publish these basic statistics and many do not choose to do so.

It is crucial that such transparency is in place. It is the Information Commissioner’s policy to subject authorities that consistently fail to comply with the Act’s time limits to a three-month period of monitoring, and if their performance does not improve during this period enforcement action may be taken. The decision on which authorities to monitor is partly based on the number of complaints of delay which the Information Commissioner’s Office receives. Any authority which fails to comply with at least 85 per cent of requests within the time limits is also selected for monitoring. However, as authorities are not required to publish their compliance figures, poor performers may not always be detected. This cannot be acceptable and this amendment would help to ensure that that situation is put right by getting the necessary figures published.

Finally, Amendment 151N would insert a time limit into the Act for complying with internal reviews. Under the Act the Information Commissioner is not required to investigate a complaint unless the authority has first carried out an internal review into the contested decision. However, the Act lays down no time limit for completing such an internal review. It merely says that the commissioner is not required to investigate until this review has been “exhausted”.

The amendment defines what “exhausted” means as one of three things: first, that a decision has been communicated to the applicant, which is the current position; secondly, that no decision has been communicated after 20 working days, which in effect gives the authority 20 working days to carry out the internal review in ordinary cases; and, thirdly, for exceptionally complex cases, no decision has been communicated after 40 working days. This is obviously consistent with the previous amendments in this group. This would give an authority, in effect, 40 working days for internal review in complex cases. Authorities would have to notify the applicant within the initial 20 days that they needed to take this extra time, and the extension would be available only if the issue was genuinely complex. This would implement the Information Commissioner’s current guidance, which is that internal reviews should normally be done within 20 working days but should never exceed 40 working days.

These seem to me practical and sensible measures which put right what were probably mistakes or errors of drafting in the original Bill. We obviously did not think it through fully enough. I hope that the Government will look at the amendment sympathetically. I beg to move.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, these amendments merely seek to ensure that the process operates as quickly and as efficiently as possible by providing a duty on public authorities to expedite requests through the relevant processes as quickly as possible and within a certain period of time. I believe that they are entirely reasonable and are a matter of enhanced transparency and good governance. My noble friend is right when he says that they could also help to resolve some of the deeper problems that we discussed earlier. Therefore, I very much hope that the Government will support these reasonable, clear and sensible amendments which would ensure that the system worked better in favour of public accountability—which is, after all, what the FOI Act was designed to serve.

Representation of the People (Electoral Registration Data Schemes) Regulations 2011

Debate between Lord Wills and Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Wills]

I agree. This was a particularly intractable problem, which Governments have looked at and tried to solve over a very long period. We were not in power for the whole of the past 50 years. Other Governments were in power and they, too, did nothing about moving towards individual registration. We tried to move towards it. The problem was that, every time we looked at achieving the desirable good of individual registration, we saw the problems with the register. We took necessary and important steps to improve the register, but I admit that they were not sufficient. I accept that and the noble Lord is right to criticise us for it. However, you cannot try to achieve one desirable good at the risk of creating what I would see as a greater ill, which is damaging a flawed register even more than it is already damaged.

It was not an easy process, but we found a way to do that. It took a huge amount of effort and negotiation with all sides, including the Electoral Commission, which had to be satisfied that it was proper. We found a balance by coupling the two processes. We coupled the improvement of the register so that it became comprehensive and accurate with individual registration. That, we hoped, would put pressure on everyone to drive up registration rates and move within a reasonable timeframe—and 2015 really is a reasonable timeframe; this is not long-grass territory. Therefore, we moved towards individual registration within a reasonable timeframe and, at the same time, tried to ensure that the register was not damaged, or, to be precise, damaged more than it was already.

I hope that the noble Lord will accept that that is a reasonable point of view. We have to be careful with this. I know that the Minister has not tried to do so, but it is wrong to claim—I am hearing this among the background noises—that these desirable and worthwhile measures that he has brought before us today, for which we are all grateful, on their own justify the partisan rush to individual registration. For all their merits, they do not.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his clear explanation of the instruments and I look forward to our future debates on the speeding up of the implementation of individual electoral registration by July 2014. Obviously, this is a hugely important issue and there is much more to be debated—I associate myself with everything that my noble friend said.

I believe that it is a citizen’s duty to vote and I welcome all efforts to maximise the number of people who are registered to vote. It is deeply depressing that there are 3.5 million people and perhaps closer to 6 million people—I, too, read the article in today’s Guardian—who are eligible to vote but who do not because they are not registered. This disempowers the individual and is damaging to democracy. The fact that a huge proportion of those unregistered are probably young and on lower incomes means that those who are perhaps most in need of a voice do not have one. Therefore, I welcome all measures to improve voter registration.

Effective mechanisms must be established to ensure that the maximum number of people are on the register, so I welcome the instruments that are before us today. I welcome the pilot data-matching schemes, especially the one in the Forest of Dean, which I shall watch with special interest. However, the pilots will be useful only if there is proper evaluation.

Like other noble Lords, I am somewhat concerned about the speed of this. Article 5 of the order specifies the date by which the Electoral Commission must produce a report on the operation of each scheme as 1 March 2012. The Electoral Commission tells us that its agreement to this date is on the basis that the pilot schemes will have been concluded by December 2011— I am not sure whether the noble Lord suggested that that had been put back—and that EROs will be able to provide it with information throughout that process. December is a mere five and a half months away and I hope that many of those employees will get some summer holidays, so will the Minister confirm whether he thinks that this timescale is practical? If the time does not prove to be adequate, will it be extended? I should also be grateful for some further information about the evaluation of the projects and for his assurance that he will report back to Parliament on the process. I will be interested to hear the answers to the questions posed by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, about the way in which these specific projects were chosen.

I say as an aside that last week I had a meeting with one of the deputy election commissioners in India, a vast country where elections are organised for 750 million participants. I was interested to learn and see that the electoral registers there carry photographs of each person who is eligible to vote. I am not proposing that we should adopt that practice but, like my noble friend Lord Wills, I wonder what other ways the Government are exploring of increasing voter registration. Have they considered introducing a system whereby everybody is registered as of right and then opts out of the register should they wish to, so that the system is an opt-out one rather than an opt-in one?

I welcome the fact that no one who is on the register will be removed if they have not signed as an individual elector for the 2015 register, but I note that that will not be the case after the next general election. That could be a matter of concern if it leads to a greatly reduced number of people on the register and therefore weakens our democratic system, which I think is best nurtured by participation. I look forward to hearing the responses from the Minister and to our future debates on this issue.