UK FOIA requests - Spy Blog

The lawyers for the Government, seem to be desperately clutching at straws, by claiming that the Information Tribunal, in its very thorough 4 day hearing, involving submissions from top barristers Queens Councils and specialist professors of Freedom of Information Act law, somehow made improper use of a publicly published report from a Select Committee of the House of Commons, the one which scrutinises the Department for Work and Pensions.

See the House of Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions report: Third Report - 7 July 2004 - Department for Work and Pensions Management of Information Technology Projects: Making IT Deliver for DWP Customers specifically paras. 110 - 123 Publishing OGC Gateway Reviews

If they are allowed to get away with this line of reasoning, then there is no point in any of the supposedly powerful Select Committees whatsoever, if their official public reports following their inquiries and investigations, cannot be used to scrutinise the policies and decisions of Central Government Departments or Agencies.

Incredibly, they are being supported by a lawyer acting on behalf of the Speaker of the House of Commons, to help the Executive branch of the Government (i.e. no longer the Monarch, but a Central Government Department, which was not the case in the 17th Century) to suppress the rights of the public in general, and of the two people who submitted the original Freedom of Information Act requests, which have been considered together by the Information Tribunal. One of those people is actually a Member of Parliament !

This bit of law is what is supposed to protect Members of Parliament from libel cases for what they say, with Parliamentary Privilege, in speeches or debates, in the Chamber of the House of Commons.

This fundamental constitutional law pre-dates the official record of the proceedings of Parliament i.e. Hansard, which started out as a private sector journalistic publishing venture, and the general acceptance of press and media reporting of the procedures of Parliament. Neither of these existed back in the 17th Century.

Provided that these reports use fair and accurate quotations, then these media reports are themselves protected by Parliamentary Privilege from being accused of promulgating what might be a libel, if it had not been uttered by an MP within the House of Commons. This protection against libel or other civil cases also extends to the witnesses giving oral or written evidence before a Select Committee and to the official written Reports of Select Committees of the House of Commons, and the Lords or Joint Committees of both Houses of Parliament.

There are perverse consequences of this Parliamentary Privilege e.g.
1995 case of the then MP Neil Hamilton ("Cash for Questions"), trying to sue The Guardian newspaper for libel, and being unable to, because The Guardian would not have been able to get a fair trial in a UK Court, by not being able to quote any of his speeches or the rules of the House of Commons. This anomaly was later amended by specific legislation allowing MPs to waive their parliamentary Privilege on an individual, case by case basis, so as to sue for defamation..

See Defamation Act 1996 section 13 Evidence concerning proceedings in Parliament

The provisos in this section of the Act explicitly cover Select Committee evidence and reports.

Information Tribunal was not criticising, let alone libeling or even "Questioning" the Select Committee report. The Information Tribunal simply cited this publicly published Report as evidence, noting the arguments, both for and against publication of such Gateway Reviews.

para 23

In the course of this hearing, the Tribunal was referred to the inquiry conducted by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions that reported in 2004 on Management of Information Technology Projects: Making IT Deliver for DWP Customers. It considered, amongst other things, the arguments for and against publishing GR’s.

The "Questioning" by the Information Tribunal Judgement was of the Office for Government Commerce, part of HM Treasury, headed, at the time (May 2007) by the "control freak" Chancellor / Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

That is definitely not anything to do with the "Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament" which is what the Bill of Rights clause is on about !

How can the High Court, Judge Mr. Justice Stanley Brunton possibly decide that reading or mentioning a Select Committee Report contravenes the Bill of Rights, without also destroying Hansard, official Government Press Releases, the wider Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press ?

How can he ignore the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840 ?

The Speaker of the House of Commons should not be colluding with the Government and the civil service bureaucracy, he should be Ordering them, under threat of Contempt of Parliament, to obey the several cross-party Select Committees such as the Public Accounts Committee, the Home Affairs Committee, and the Work and Pensions Committee etc. have not even been allowed to see copies of Gateway Review reports, even in closed evidence sessions.

That is the scandal which the Speaker of the House of Commons should be employing lawyers to remedy.

He should not be helping to suppress proper public and Parliamentary scrutiny of massive Government IT projects, involving millions of pounds of public money, which will affect every person in the UK, individually.

The publication of the High Court's Judgment could take several weeks or months. We await the result, with mounting despair and resentment of the English legal system, which is stacked by the Government so heavily against normal individual citizens, and which fails to uphold their fundamental human rights, in a speedy and just manner.