Local Audit (Public Access to Documents) Bill

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 25th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) for bringing forward the Bill. It is a very simple Bill, which many of us will find quite refreshing for a Friday. It is really a Bill to repair things, following the passage of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. I thank my hon. Friend for introducing it, because it has given me an opportunity to get a greater feel for the existing legislation. I perhaps should have had a little more awareness of it, given that in a former life I was the chairman of an audit committee in a unitary authority. In that role, I was very aware of what we should do: how we should be open and transparent, and how we should listen to the public when they raise queries about how their money is spent by their elected representatives.

My hon. Friend explained why she has given up a Friday to be in the Chamber. I am giving up my Friday for a very similar reason, which is to try to advance a Bill. Unfortunately, my Bill is No. 5 this afternoon, but I am very pleased to be able to consider and support my hon. Friend’s Bill.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

May I take a moment to congratulate my hon. Friend on his Bill, at No. 5, which is extremely important? He and I are most passionate about it, because we do not like exports of live animals.

[Craig Mackinlay]

I thank my hon. Friend for the support he would have given my Bill, had we reached it, but we have not. Let us therefore consider very carefully the Bill to amend the Local Audit and Accountability Act. Very soon after it became law, the Government recognised that the terminology of “persons interested” should be expanded, and that is what the Bill is trying to achieve.

We would not have got to this point had a council not tried to hide behind the legislation and examined what “persons interested” actually means. Bristol City Council obfuscated on a request by HTV, the western brand of the ITV network, in 2004. It is quite remarkable that the council felt that it was reasonable to spend taxpayers’ money on fighting, under the legislation at the time, what I imagine was a reasonable freedom of information request for transparency about what it was doing. Journalists can be troublesome people—

[Wendy Morton]

Not all of them.

[Craig Mackinlay]

No, indeed, and I will explain how good some journalists are. Journalists have benefited from FOI legislation, and many public authorities see them as something of a scourge, but I do not agree.

[Charlie Elphicke]

My hon. Friend is being very generous with interventions. First, does he agree that journalism and investigative journalism are important in ensuring that there is full accountability in our democracy? Secondly, does he agree that FOIs are incredibly important in finding out information that large authorities often try to conceal?

[Craig Mackinlay]

I was about to explain the power and importance of a free press to a democratic society. To my mind, FOIs are very important. It is important that journalists and members of the public can shine a light into areas of government—today, we are considering local government in particular—that might otherwise have remained in the dark. Many right hon. and hon. Members, including those present, will have experience of journalists. They often give us a tough time, and so they should. Sometimes it is deserved, though sometimes it is not.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

A very good example of that type of journalism is when the BBC looked into the Circuit of Wales. A £10 million grant that was given to it led to more than £1 million of public money being wasted. It was transferred to the private company of the Circuit of Wales’ director, Aventa Capital, and many thousands of pounds were spent on gardening fees for his garden. Good journalism can highlight those wastes of public money.

[Craig Mackinlay]

I thank my hon. Friend for putting that on the parliamentary record. That shows that we cannot always rely on external, or even internal, auditors of councils, who have materiality levels to consider. It is often individuals, particularly the press, working through FOIs who shine a light on various areas.

As I was saying, we are sometimes deservedly, and sometimes not deservedly, investigated by the press, but bodies that spend public funds deserve no protection whatever from the eyes and ears of the press. I say again how important a free press is to democratic accountability in this country, whether in central Government, Departments, quangos or local authorities.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills for explaining the extent of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014. It covers fire and rescue authorities, police authorities, parks, local and combined authorities, and parishes and town councils, beyond the £25,000 threshold. The 2014 Act does not restrict the definition of individual electors. Indeed, that was expanded through the case that was brought against Bristol City Council. It allows members of the local press to make inquiries, because they are likely to be local electors.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) for making a relevant point about the sad demise of local reporters and the local press. I have two local newspapers, the Isle of Thanet Gazette and the Thanet Extra. Once the homes section of the newspaper has been shaken out, there is not much left. The opportunity for local reporters to go to council meetings and attend civic events has diminished greatly. That reflects changes in advertising revenue, which often underpins local newspapers, as more and more material goes online—a point ably made by other colleagues. The whole movement online raises the question of what “publication” means. It means something very different from what it did in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

That brings me on to the question of what a journalist is. Given my ideas on open and democratic government, accountability, and people’s ability to ask questions, I would be more comfortable allowing anyone to make a request under the Bill. However, I fully understand how vexatious those who seem to be serial question-askers can be. We have to balance that tendency with the cost to local government of supplying information that has been asked for.

The term “citizen journalist” has been mentioned, although I fully agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset: I do not subscribe to being a citizen; I would rather remain a subject, so “subject reporters” may be a better term. However, am I a subject journalist? Possibly; I do Twitter and Facebook, and my Facebook account is open, not closed, so perhaps I, too, am a subject journalist. It worries me when legislation that comes through the House has slightly vague terminology, as a lot of it does. We may have an opportunity in Committee to get rid of any vagueness about the term “journalist”, and to get to what I feel my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills intends, namely that this type of inquiry is narrowed down to people who really have an interest in reporting and looking at matters rather more closely, in the public interest.

[Craig Whittaker]

In the same vein of getting some context on what is defined as journalism, is my hon. Friend aware of the huge rise in fake news websites around the world, which specifically—I have just googled this—attempt to

“play on gullible people who do not check sources”,

and will simply pass the fake news on, as if it were really true? How do we get around that problem?

[Craig Mackinlay]

My hon. Friend makes an enormously interesting point. In the modern world, there are new websites that simply drag in bits of information from other, more credible, websites and pass it off as their own.

We are now struggling with what “journalist” really means. Perhaps that can be battened down a little more in Committee. Arguably that definition could be even wider—as I have said, I would be comfortable with that—with anyone being involved, given that arguably every voter in the UK has an interest in every single authority because of the national grant that passes from this place, through the Department for Communities and Local Government, to local authority level. Perhaps everyone has an interest, but we need nevertheless to narrow the definition down away from the vexatious inquirer with whom we are all very familiar.

I will leave my remarks there, but in support of the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills, I say that it is quite right that journalism should play a key role in our democracy. People have the right to ask questions about any fund-holding body spending money in their name, so I struggle to find any reason to be against the Bill. I wish it every support possible in its next stages. Any rough edges will be ironed out in Committee.