Some mistake, surely?
June 19th, 2007I have been reading the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill recently passed through the House of Commons with the support, amongst others, of South Swindon’s current MP. In a recent letter to the Adver, she suggested that the Bill would help keep correspondence between her and her constituents private. Some mistake, surely?
The Bill relates to correspondence between MPs and what is referred in Clause 3 as “Public Bodies”. This would include Swindon Borough Council, for example, but obviously not individual constituents.
It may well be that she was worried about correspondence to the Council that referred in detail to individual constituents’ cases being in the public domain. A genuine concern, I agree. However, existing data protection legislation serves to protect the identity of individuals referred to in such correspondence.
Further, this Bill is not about data protection and privacy. It is about the our right to seek access to documents about third parties. At present, there is no “class exemption” covering types of documents. Each application is treated on its own merits, that is, on a case-by-case basis. This proposed amendment to the FOI 2000 would represent a new and unwelcome departure, therefore, from the current system.
Finally, this amendment does not guarantee the confidentiality of MPs correspondence to public bodies, because a decision could still be made to release such correspondence if it was considered that the public interest in disclosure outweighed that of witholding the information.
A better course would be look again at the provisions of the Data Protection Act to see if they adequately protect the privacy of constituents. If there are examples of sensitive matters being made public in an inappropriate way, then it is the DPA regime that is relevant, not Freedom of Information. Although I understand some of her concerns, I seriously question the merits of the decision of South Swindon’s Labour MP to support this unwelcome measure and her comments in justification of it.
