Here's a brain-teaser for all you devolution obsessives out there. After Home Rule arrives next year, what will the Scots be banned from having that the English, Welsh, and Northern Irish can happily, legally, go ahead and enjoy? The answer isn't desperately sexy, but it is very important, and is a classic example of how the often dreary and incomprehensible business of politics can actually improve people's lives. It is this: access to a wide spectrum of information - ranging from the merely interesting, through the genuinely useful to the sometimes truly vital - held by Them (officialdom) about Us (ordinary British citizens) and their own activities. Put simply, everyone in the UK is finally being a given an unfettered legal right to freedom of information - except people in Scotland.
Yesterday MPs on the influential Commons Public Administration Select Committee said that wasn't on. They declared that the Government had got it wrong when it decided to exclude Scotland from its historic White Paper on freedom of information published last December, and urged it to rectify the situation by giving Scots exactly
the same rights as every other British citizen. The situation might sound
like a confusing Whitehall farce worthy of Jim Hacker in Yes, Minister. But,
as legislation goes, this is one piece
of law-making which really should be put right.
Ministers claim introducing a Freedom of Information Act will banish Britain's ingrained culture of secrecy forever. For once the rhetoric is justified. The planned law will give
people for the first time a legal right
to see almost all official information. Its scope is impressive. It will compel central and local government, quangos, the NHS, courts and tribunals, the police, schools, colleges and univer-sities, state-controlled industries, semi-government agencies, and the priv- atised utilities to disclose information on demand.
But not in Scotland. When Ministers and civil servants were drawing up the White Paper, they decided to treat north of the Border differently to everywhere else. While England, Wales, and Northern Ireland would benefit from new, radical, wide-ranging laws of openness, freedom of information in Scotland would extend only to policy areas retained at Westminster such as defence, foreign affairs, and social security. So the document decreed that it was up to the Holyrood Parliament to introduce freedom of information for the devolved policy areas - such as health, education, and criminal justice - under its control.
Those subjects, of course, are the very ones which most people on both sides of the Border will want to obtain information about once the White Paper becomes law. Quite a few citizens are likely to want to take advantage of their new-found ability to find out what's going on inside their local school or hospital. In Scotland, though, that won't be possible.
Edinburgh Pentlands MP and select committee member Lynda Clark says the John Stonehouse affair in the 1970s illustrates the value of access to information. The disappearing MP was rumbled when someone looking through the Swedish Prime Minister's correspondence under the country's impressively liberal openness laws found that he'd written to the premier seeking asylum. Although a staunch supporter of Home Rule, Clark says leaving Scotland to introduce its own legislation for these areas was a bad decision.
She sympathises with the theory
that Scotland's own Parliament should decide what's best for Scotland, but
in her view the freedom of inform-ation proposals should be amended to cover the whole of the UK - without any exceptions.
As the select committee's report yesterday pointed out, freedom of information is unlikely to be among the Holyrood body's top priorities so it may be some time until it enacts
such legislation. Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, believes the situation is absurd. ''If the Scottish Parliament weren't to get round to this for years, that would mean the Scottish public would have no right to know how
Scotland was being governed in the early years after devolution. It's completely unsatisfactory.''
FRANKEL adds: ''I suspect most people in Scotland would find it unacceptable, especially when a new system of government is being developed in Scotland, to not have the same right to information that people in the rest of the UK have.'' Frankel claims it is also perverse that Scotland of all places in the UK is getting fewer rights because in his experience public authorities, the media, non-governmental organisations and interest groups are more enthusiastic about freedom of information than their counterparts elsewhere. A further anomaly, pointed out by the Scottish Consumer Council in its submission on the White Paper, is that after devolution Westminster will continue to control data protection
but not freedom of information, at least not as it applies to bread-and-butter devolved matters.
The Government proposals as currently drafted are a mess. No wonder the select committee yesterday said: ''There needs to be a system which can be used to facilitate the application of the Act in Scotland as soon as possible.'' Will it happen? The hugely-influential Lord Chancellor - Lord Irvine of Lairg, a Scot - has acknowledged the ''force'' of the select committee's argument. And what of the Cabinet Office, the department which came up with the proposals? A spokeswoman would give her name but not say if the Freedom of Information Bill due this summer will extend full rights to Scots. That's a secret, you see.
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