Last October Gordon Brown said he had conducted a series of reviews into the taxation of the non-domiciled when Chancellor and all the information should be made available to the public.
This was at a time when the issue was at the top of the political agenda. It was the week after George Osborne's Tory conference speech, with its dramatic and important of a cut in inheritance tax to be funded by charging non-doms in return for their tax breaks.
Brown his monthly prime ministerial press conference 'The non-domicile taxation, when I was Chancellor we carried out a series of reviews ... I have investigated this in the past. There will no doubt be reviews in the future. I think all the information should be made available to people.'
So, as the prime minister was indicating that all the information on the government's unpublished series of reviews over several years of a major policy controversy would be made available, I naturally thought I'd ask for it. I put freedom of information requests to the Treasury and to Revenue and Customs.
Most of the time since has been taken up by various procedural wrangles and bureaucratic bungles on the part of these two departments. Doubtless you'd like to know the full details, but they're too tedious even for me to recount.
However, here are some of them: The Treasury completely ignored my request for an internal review, until I copied them in on a complaint I made to the Information Commissioner. At this point I received a Treasury email saying 'I need to apologise to you on this 'review', we had missed it in the email box and no-one was allocated it'.
Still their record was not quite as bad as that of Revenue and Customs, who (again after I involved the Commissioner's office) justified their total failure to respond by stating bizarrely that they never received my original request. This is despite the fact that I received a series of acknowledgments from their staff promising to act on it.
HMRC has now sent me some links to publicly available material, while the Treasury has eventually decided it is not in the public interest to reveal submissions made to Ministers on this topic. Both departments seem to fall well short of the prime minister's assurance that all the information would be made available. (Perhaps some people may see this as evidence that his authority is waning?)
Last month I recorded my puzzlement at the fact that Avon and Somerset Police appeared to have destroyed their previous policy on the deletion and retention of records before they had finished drafting a new one.
I have now received an email from their Information Manager, in reply to my internal review, apologising for the previous responses to my FOI requests on this which he says 'have given an unintentional but nevertheless inaccurate impression of events'. And he has sent me a copy of the current record retention and weeding policy, which I was refused before on the grounds that it is still a draft although 'being adhered to'.
As for the file on the failed prosecution of Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy to murder (which was my original interest), he says that it should have been destroyed many years ago and therefore it was appropriate to weed it at the earliest legal opportunity following the recent Information Tribunal case.
GCSE results are out tomorrow, and a particularly interesting exam will be the music one set by the OCR board. Students who took this back in May were either delighted or disturbed to that the answers to some of the questions in one paper were given away in the copyright acknowledgments at the end.
For example, the examinees had to listen to a piece of music and identify the composer, a task made somewhat easier by the fact that the acknowledgment attributed it to Handel.
OCR's blunder could have helped candidates gain nine marks, according to an analysis of the paper prepared for Ofqual, the exams regulator in England. This was obtained from Ofqual by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ following a freedom of information request.
However Ofqual refused to reveal more detailed documentation partly because, they said, candidates 'could try to use the information contained within it to anticipate or speculate how the incident would affect the way in which their papers were marked' and this would be 'a wholly undesirable situation leading to unnecessary worry and confusion'.
Still the candidates who took this paper have learnt an important lesson for life which hopefully will stay with them long after they have forgotten whatever they once knew about Philip Glass and minimalism: Always read the small print.
It's not only Rother Council which has been quarrelling with whatdotheyknow.com. The House of Commons authorities are also over the site's policy of automatically publishing responses to freedom of information requests.
This dispute has attracted the attention of Cabinet Office IT minister Tom Watson (himself an FOI requester when a backbench MP), who 'Oh good grief'. Is it safe to assume that it is the stance of the Commons which is the cause of his exasperation?
UPDATE: I should stress that, following the of the Information Commissioner's Office, Rother Council are now answering requests received via whatdotheyknow.
Over seventy countries across the world now have freedom of information laws, covering over half the world´s population and promising them the right to know more about what their governments are doing.
But how much difference do these laws make in practice? Who really uses them, or even cares about them? And what happens when the backlash strikes?
These are some of the questions considered in a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World Service two-part documentary series, The Right to Know, which starts today. (I produced it, and you can see a picture of some of the participants on the , the under-secretary for institutional reform in the Argentinian government.)
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