We have had a reply, just within the 20 working days statutory limit to our FOIA request for the Partial Regulatory Impact Assessment, dealing with the United Nations Measures Order 2006, which was mentioned as being available on the HM Treasury website, but which plainly was not.
This lengthy and complicated set of far reaching powers, backed up with criminal penalties, are to enforce "freezing" of allegedly terrorist financial assets.
Since there has been no debate or scrutiny in Parliament about these extended bureaucratic red tape powers, one would have hoped that the Partial Regulatory Impact Assessment might have made things clearer.
The RIA is available on the OPSI website and you can access it via the following link.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/em2006/uksiem_20062657_en.pdf
According to the (,pdf) meta data, this was created by the Privy Council on 11th October 2006, so why it has taken the Treasury so long to make it available is a mystery.
However, the document admits that there has been no actual consultation with anybody, and it makes unsubstantiated claims that there will be no impact or cost to , for example, small businesses, despite the wording being so catch-all as to encompass every "person" in the United Kingdom, both individuals and corporate entities.
We look forward to the other two, probably duplicated word for word, Partial Regulatory impact Assessments, for the other two, almost identical and overlapping United Nations Measures Orders, which mention the Taliban and AL Qaida (even though everyone covered under these financial sanctions will already be under the first United Nations Measures Order 2006), and North Korea, which is also a duplication of the other two Orders, both of which already automatically include anyone sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council anyway.
Confused ? Surely not, after all Gordon Brown has promised a "25% cut in red tape", some time in the future.
Why it took a formal Freedom of Information Act request to get sight of a document which was publicly promised to already have been published on-line in October, and which contains so little meaningful or believable detail, is a mystery to us.
The FOIA reply from the Treasury via email, as an attached (,pdf) file, with a (.tif) image scan of the Partial RIA:
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