Your Right To Know

Sir Humphrey, of Yes Minister fame, once said: “the public doesn’t know anything about wasting government money. We are the experts.” But he didn’t have FOI requests to think about. Every now and then since 2005, the public has glimpsed how “expertly” our cash is wasted.

Often wastage is due to incompetence but another way our political elite use public money is spending it on themselves. According to figures released to the Taxpayers Alliance, over 17,000 public sector workers have retired with pensions worth £33 000 annually. According to TPA calculations, that’s the equivalent of a £1 million pension pot in the private sector.

The Daily Telegraph reports: “four out of five private sector final salary schemes are closed to new members as companies consider them too expensive in an era of rising life expectancies. But around 5 million public sector workers still enjoy final salary pensions, many of them funded from general taxation.”

The Treasury told the Telegraph: “High-quality pension provision is a key part of the remuneration package of public servants, aimed at maintaining a high-quality public sector workforce. These pensions are fully costed and fully affordable.”

Translation: “the public sector plays by its own rules, thank you very much”. Sir Humphrey couldn’t have said it better himself. It’s only by continuing to press for government accountability that this elitist, “Yes Minister” culture can be altered.

It seems that the officers at North Wales Police were having problems with their petrol. No matter how many times they put it into their diesel engines, their cars wouldn’t run on the stuff.

So in 2006, reports Walesonline.co.uk, the force introduced a bright yellow filler cap cover marked with the word “diesel”. The flap is said to be located so that it must be moved in order to get the fuel-pump nozzle into the car.

An FOI request revealed that since the introduction of this measure, officers went on to make the same mistake 26 times. Over the last year, the cost to the taxpayer has been nearly £3000.

The ICO issued a “formal practice recommendation” to the The Department for Communities and Local Government following delays of up to 400 days for processing freedom of information requests. All freedom of information act requests should be responded to within 20 working days unless special circumstances apply.

The ICO recommendation says:

In issuing this practice recommendation, the Commissioner recognises the assurances already made by the Department. However he considers that, to date, it has failed to demonstrate an appropriate level of commitment to improvement and failed to offer acceptable explanations for the performance issues. Furthermore, the extent of the internal delays are so significant that the Commissioner wishes to make them a matter of public record, in keeping with his general functions to disseminate information on the operation of the Act under section 47 (2). In the Commissioner’s view, the public should be made aware that delays of this nature are not acceptable.”

You can read the whole recommendation here and the Local Government Chronicle’s write up here.
It’ll be interesting to see if the ICO’s report makes any difference to the DCLG’s FOI performance.

I’m actually a dual UK/US citizen but today I feel extremely proud to be an American. This is what real democracy is all about. Barack Obama says it best:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

He highlighted that his candidacy was not cooked up by political insiders (as happens in the UK) but was a movement fuelled by the will of the common people. And it was the people he thanked in his victory speech. I love that optimistic belief that people can and do make a difference if they are determined in their dreams. It’s for this reason I wrote ‘Your Right to Know’, it’s for this reason I took MPs to the High Court to get them to be accountable directly to their constituents. It’s for this reason that we all have a chance at making the UK a more transparent and democratic country.

So on this historic day for democracy why not send in a freedom of information request? You can begin putting pressure on your local officials to stop being so secretive and elitist and start sharing information and power with the citizens. It may not be a call to arms but at least it should prompt you to write a letter.

Make your request at www.whatdotheyknow.com

A shot of pure democracy
The Big Issue, October 2008
By Heather Brooke

I’ve just completed my absentee ballot for the US elections. It took two requests to receive it but I don’t think that had anything to do with me being a democrat in the state of Florida – famous for voting irregularities that helped put George W. Bush into the White House.

I look forward to receiving my American ballot. It’s a shot of pure democracy which I long for after the faux democracy of the UK. I’ve seen too many meaningless public consultations where the will of the people is ignored, and MPs put in position not by the people but a tiny faction of a party elite, to think much of English democracy. In the US, by contrast, I feel my vote counts. The presidential election is just a small part of this particular American ballot paper. Judges, sheriffs, public prosecutors and defenders, councillors and neighbourhood representatives are all up for the people’s vote, along with proposed amendments to the state constitution and the way property tax is calculated. Nor are all the positions party political. Judges are non-partisan and their position rarely contested but the people still have a choice:

Shall Judge Charles T. Wells of the Supreme Court be retained in office?
Two options – Yes or No.

Can you imagine an English judge or police chief being made to answer to the public like this? The very idea no doubt sends shivers of fear through their elitist bones. How vulgar! The great unwashed masses deciding the future of their betters. Unthinkable! This mentality abounds and it is not confined to any particular political party: Conservative paternalism is based on privilege, Labour’s on the belief that the State knows what’s best for us. It’s difficult to know which one is worse.

There is much rhetoric about English democracy but what is it in practice? Did any of us have a say in Peter Mandelson’s promotion to the House of Lords? Or the person chosen to head London’s Metropolitan Police? It’s true we do elect MPs but is our selection really a choice? More often it is simply a rubber-stamp. The real selection is done by a tiny number of unelected party officials in relative secrecy, there is not even a primary where all party members have a say.

Councillors are elected but an inverse ratio exists whereby the less power they have, the more councillors there are. Miami-Dade County manages to get by with just 13 Commissioners to represent a population of 2.4 million. They have the power to raise their own property taxes and spend that money as they wish. Tower Hamlets by contrast has a population of not even 200,000 yet it’s packed with 51 councillors who oversee a budget in which 80 per cent of the money comes from Whitehall and is already allocated. With so many councillors, no one person can ever be held accountable for poor decisions.

In the US property tax stays in the area where it is collected so people can see clearly what they are getting (or not) for their money. This is a great spur to the performance and efficiency of any council. This relationship doesn’t exist in the UK.
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The misclassification of government crime figures revealed last week will instil even greater distrust of official statistics, if that’s possible. For data you can rely on, you need to see the raw numbers yourself. This is why FOI is so important.

FOI requests made by Sunday Telegraph reporters showed how crime figures are being spun for political reasons. They discovered gun crime is 60 per cent higher than official figures would have us believe as official figures excluded illegal possession of a firearm and gun-smuggling in their totals.

They also found that poice forces in England and Wales were massively underreporting knife crime. Until this year, knife offences categorised as actual bodily harm, rape, sexual assault or threats to kill were excluded from the knife crime count. Once they were included, police forces were on course to record a total of 38,000 serious knife crimes this year – more than 100 a day. The figure is at least two-thirds higher than last year’s total of 22,151 offences, announced by the Home Office in July when it unveiled its first annual count of knife crimes.

They do say that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector; but I didn’t realise it was true of data leaks. The UK’s financial services firms put 16.5 million people at risk of ID fraud last year, according to figures released to Computer Weekly.

The Freedom of Information Act has so far revealed that financial services companies reported 56 incidents of lost or stolen data to the Financial Services Authority last year, placing around one in four UK customers at risk of fraud.

Family courts are to be opened up to public scrutiny The Times announces today. The move is in response to mounting criticism from parents whose children are taken into care and complaints that they are victims of “secret justice”.

I wrote about the problem of secrecy in the Family Courts back in 2004 in the first edition of Your Right to Know. The situation has not improved since then despite government promises for reform and a consultation in 2006. The former Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer, made the cowardly decision to maintain the status quo which gave social workers and other so-called ‘experts’ a license to operate with almost total impunity.

The power to seize people’s children must surely be one of the most draconian state powers. Great power entails the greatest amount of accountability which can only come through openness. Yet that is precisely what’s been missing from the Family Courts. It is good to read that judges have finally begun to see the damaging costs of secrecy. But opposition is still strong from those organisations representing social workers. They claim secrecy is necessary to protect the privacy of the child, but more often it protects social workers from public scrutiny.

Judges already have the power to impose naming restrictions to protect children’s privacy so there is no need to close off an entire branch of the judicial system. Public confidence in the justice system can only be assured if the courts and the evidence used in those courts are open to the public.

Secrecy allows bad practice to carry on unchecked. It fuels mistrust in the judicial system. Stories abound of the courts removing children from their families on flimsy medical evidence or simply the opinion of a social worker who may have never even met the child.

I believe this current shift in opinion is mostly due to the writing of Camilla Cavendish who was able to put faces to the nameless victims of Family Court secrecy. It is often the case that while the costs of openness are exaggerated, if not blatantly made up, the costs of secrecy are discounted and ignored. Cavendish was able to show in terms of ruined families’ lives the cost of Family Court secrecy.

Social workers have been allowed to think they are above the law and their opinions not open to question. The reputation of the Family Courts depends on the ability of the public to see justice being done.

The Telegraph has revealed that MPs will now receive a months ‘grace period’ before the full details of their expenses claims are published.

Before details are made public, MPs will be able to use the appeal period to decide which entries are a risk to their security and therefore should be omitted from the public records. These records can include details of expenses for security systems and claims for services that would give clues to the location of their homes.

YRTK’s Heather Brooke commented:

‘”What other employee gets extra time to filter out embarrassing expenses from their boss? Yet again MPs think it’s one rule for them and another for the rest of us.”

“Business names need to be disclosed to ensure MPs aren’t giving sweet deals to their friends and relatives. If they have nothing to fear then they should have nothing to hide.”

Once the first round of expenses are made public, up-to-date details of all MPs’ latest expenses claims will be published by the Commons four times a year.

Public services should be for the many not the few
The Big Issue, September 2008
By Heather Brooke

In for a penny in for a pound or at least 50 pence. That’s how much you’ll pay to visit the so-called public toilets around Parliament.

Local councils say the reason for leasing out the loos to private companies is purely economic. In a Westminster cabinet member report, officials say that the £2.7 million the council spends on public toilets is “a high level of expenditure for an entirely discretionary service.”

What? Pissing is discretionary? Tell that to your bladder the next time you get a call from nature. I suppose they mean peeing in public. We could go home or buy something in Starbucks or a pub and use their toilet. But should we have to? And what about those who have nowhere to go or the money for a purchase? And really, what else are taxes for but to provide common public services for which there is no commercial incentive?

Surely it’s basic human dignity (and hygiene) to have access to a clean toilet. Yet the number of public loos has diminished by 50 per cent according to Mike Bone, Director of the British Toilet Association, a finding backed up by other government investigations. London has seen the worst decline with just 400 public toilets left in a city with nearly 7.5 million people. That’s one for nearly 18,000 Londoners. Quite a queue!

It gets worse. There are 28 million visitors to London, of whom 12 million are from overseas and there is just one public toilet for every 67,000. That’s even before we consider the 2012 Olympics. Public transport is no better: of data supplied by 255 Tube stations, only 88 (35 per cent) have public toilet provision.

Beijing spent $48million (£27million) to provide 4,700 public toilets for the 2008 Games, one for every 500 metres. In addition all restaurants, shops and hotels have to offer their toilets for the use of non-customers for free.

I’m a healthy young woman and I find the lack of public loos in London extremely inconvenient so how much worse it must be for older people, pregnant women, parents with young children and those with urinary health issues. These people suffer while the young men who piss publicly on the street are given extra street urinals. Will it take a cadre of women urinating in public before we are given adequate resources?

When I think of all the nonsense my taxes pay for such as social engineering projects, public relations (which is little more than political propaganda) and top officials’ salaries, I am livid. According to the Town Hall Rich List (http://tinyurl.com/3xnw6v), 818 council managers earned more than £100,000 in 2006-07, up from 645 the previous year and in 2007 Tower Hamlets, England’s most deprived borough, paid 27 staffers more than £100,000!
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