Breakthrough for Press Gazette FoI campaign

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 29 March 2007 at 11:29
Tags: Department for Constitutional Affairs, Freedom of Information

The Government showed today that it has taken on board the massive and unprecedented opposition from Britain’s journalists to its proposals to water down the Freedom of Information Act, by announcing a second round of consultation on the plans.

The proposed Freedom of Information and Data Protection Regulations would have had a massive impact on journalists’ ability to use the FoI Act.

Director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information Maurice Frankel said that under the new rules: “Any penetrating requests would be very likely to be refused in future.”

This Government has had a rocky relationship with the press in recent years, but it now deserves credit and thanks for listening to the argument and thinking again on these dreadful FoI proposals.

Hopefully, Press Gazette’s Don’t Kill FoI Campaign had some impact on the decision-making process. It would have been a foolhardy government indeed to ignore the views of the editors of nearly every national and daily newspaper in the land – who signed our e-petition.

The extended consultation period, until 21 June, will mean that the final say on the new FoI rules is likely to lie with Gordon Brown, rather than Tony Blair.

Let’s hope he is true to his word and honours the commitment he gave editors and newspaper executives at a Journalists’ Charity lunch earlier this month, when he said: “It’s easy for politicians to say one thing and do another — but I do think we should defend British liberties and that we can be a beacon for the world with the contribution our press makes.”

Falconer forgets that we journalists act on readers’ behalf

Posted by Press Gazette on 28 March 2007 at 10:01
Tags: Charlie Falconer, Department for Constitutional Affairs, Freedom of Information, Journalism, Journalists, Press Gazette Leaders, Tony Blair

Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer has illustrated once again that he has only the dimmest understanding of the way journalism works. It’s a scary thought, considering the huge influence the Department for Constitutional Affairs has on our working lives.

Defending plans currently under consideration by the Government to massively increase the number of Freedom of Information requests thrown out on cost grounds, he perversely told an audience of lawyers last week that the “Freedom of Information Act is one of the greatest reforms for which this Government will rightly be remembered.”

And defending his proposals to, in the words of the Newspaper Society, “neuter” the act for journalists, he said: “The Government did not introduce freedom of information in order to do something ‘for journalism’.

We did it for the public.

“The job of the Government is not to provide page leads for the papers, but information for the citizen. Freedom of information was never considered to be, and for our part will never be considered to be, a research arm for the media.”

What Falconer apparently doesn’t understand is that journalists are in large part honest agents, acting on behalf of ordinary citizens — their readers — who don’t have the time themselves to do the work of holding public authorities to account.

Thank God that we live in a society where commercial news organisations are willing to pay people to spend large parts of their day filing requests for information to Government on everything from the hygiene inspections at local restaurants to details of the advice to the Prime Minister on the legality of his invasion of Iraq.

We are not some malign commercial force acting outside society, as Falconer appears to believe, but an important and intrinsic part of the civic democracy which he is paid to uphold.