THE Scottish Government says it is committed to being the most open and accessible government the country has ever had, but the evidence for that assertion has not always been obvious. The Government has the power to extend the Freedom of Information legislation to third parties that provide public services but it has done so only once, two years ago, when local authority leisure and culture organisations were taken into the scope of the law for the first time.
The Scottish Government has also appeared reluctant to extend FOI to housing associations. Only a few months ago, in its consultation on extending the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, it said it was not persuaded of the merits of any extension to Scotland's housing associations and cited a number of reasons for its position. Many associations, it said, were doing essentially "private" work, often on an entirely commercial basis. It also suggested very few tenants ever had difficulty in obtaining the information they wanted. And the Government said it was worried about the regulatory burdens an extension to FOI might put on the associations.
None of these arguments was ever very convincing, but the Scottish Government now appears to have backed off from them and performed a U-turn on the subject. Joe FitzPatrick the Scottish Government Minister for Parliamentary Business, now says he intends to consult with the sector next year with a view to extending FOI to housing associations after all.
This is good news. When the FOI legislation was passed in 2002, it was regarded as one of the world's strongest laws on access to information, but there has been a persistent worry that changes in the way public services are delivered have put several publically-funded organisations, housing associations included, outwith the remit of the law.
Scotland's Information Commissioner Rosemary Agnew has raised this issue in recent months and in a report earlier this year called for the immediate protection of FOI rights from what she called the damage called by outsourcing. She also specifically supported to campaign for housing associations to be included in FOI.
The argument for doing so is overwhelming. The bottom line is that housing associations spend vast sums of public money and any organisation that does so should be subject to the public scrutiny offered by FOI.
It is also important that tenants are treated fairly and consistently. If you are a council house tenant, you can, under the FOI legislation, ask the council for all kinds of information including rent or repairs. But if you are a tenant with a housing association, you have none of those rights. That cannot be fair.
The Scottish Government appears to have finally accepted this with its move towards extending FOI to housing associations. But with public services increasingly likely to be delivered by housing associations, charitable bodies and the private sector, the government's responsibilities do not end there. In the years to come, it must ensure the original FOI legislation keeps up with the pace of change. Freedom of information is a valuable concept in public life, but it is a fragile one too and the public's right to information must be protected.
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