91Èȱ¬

There now follows an intermission. Normal service will be resumed in August.

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In the few days leading up to the start of the Iraq War, Tony Blair had three phone conversations with Rupert Murdoch. One of these was 'official' and minuted by civil servants. The other two must have been either 'personal' or 'party political' or not significant enough to be minuted, if the Cabinet Office is to be believed. What they talked about at this time of extreme international tension we do not know.

We are now aware of these calls because this information has been by the Cabinet Office to the LibDem peer Lord Avebury, who had put in a freedom of information request for the dates of meetings or calls between Blair and Murdoch.

Previously the Cabinet Office had only released the date of the one 'official' call, in line with the of the Information Commissioner.

Avebury was in the process of appealing this to the , when his legal team were staggered to be told by government solicitors that the Cabinet Office would give in and disclose the information.

Funnily enough, this capitulation was communicated to them on the day after Gordon Brown became prime minister. So did revealing the dates when Blair talked to Murdoch figure prominently on day 1 of his grid for his first 100 days as PM?

It is another interesting example of the government suddenly abandoning a case rather than fight it at the Information Tribunal, which has annoyed some civil servants with decisions in favour of openness. As I noted, this also happened in the case of the official advice on pensions and dividend tax relief before the 1997 budget.

Could this become a trend? One consequence is that although this sets symbolic precedents in practice, they do not have the legal force of a Tribunal judgment.

Still, the government will find it harder in future to run the arguments they initially put forward in this case, 'that information as to the timing of discussions might allow the content of discussions to be inferred and, in addition, that disclosure might increase the pressure on the Prime Minister’s diary by increasing the expectation that he would hold discussions with others.'

The Cabinet Office have now given Avebury the dates of six contacts between Blair and Murdoch between September 2002 and April 2005. But a puzzle remains. For some reason the Cabinet Office hasn't told Avebury about the meeting between Blair and Murdoch in August 2003.

Blair felt it was a 'good meeting', and it contributed to the fact he had an enjoyable summer holiday. This is revealed in another document recently disclosed from the centre of government - Alastair Campbell's diaries.

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Which reasons used by public authorities to keep information secret are most likely to be approved by the Information Commissioner?

We've been examining the to see how often he approves the use of the various exemptions laid down in the Freedom of Information Act.

The following table gives the percentage of occasions on which the Commissioner has, after receiving a complaint, approved the use of the exemption in question by a public authority to withhold information in response to an FOI request. (The numbers in brackets indicate the section of the FOI Act which specifies that exemption).

Security services (23) 100%
Legal privilege (42) 88%
Court records (32) 83%
International relations (27) 79%
Other prohibitions (44) 74%
Personal information (40) 70%
Investigations (30) 69%
Health and safety (38) 64%
Law enforcement (31) 63%
Economy (29) 63%
Provided in confidence (41) 60%
Effective conduct of public affairs (36) 57%
Otherwise accessible (21) 53%
National security (24) 50%
Formulation of government policy (35) 31%
Commercial interests (43) 28%
Intended for future publication (22) 25%
Audit functions (33) 8%

Some caveats need to be noted: This only involves cases where a formal Decision Notice has been issued by the Commissioner; in some cases he approves the use of one exemption while rejecting another, so it's not a guide to the overall outcome of cases; in some cases the use of an exemption is partially approved - this has been scored as 0.5 of an approval for the purpose of calculating the percentages; it takes no account of the Commissioner sometimes being overruled by the Tribunal; it doesn't cover cases under the Environmental Information Regulations; it doesn't include decisions from the last few days; for some exemptions (eg national security, audit functions, court records, the economy, security services, future publication) there are under 10 cases and this makes it difficult to read much into the percentage scores.

For these reasons this is a fairly crude exercise. However it does suggest some broad, tentative conclusions - that the Commissioner is more easily persuaded that it is right to exempt information from disclosure to protect legal privilege and international relations than to protect commercial interests and the formulation of government policy.

This may reflect the Commissioner's attitudes - or it may reflect the sort of issues where public authorities seek to use an exemption when it is not justified by the circumstances.

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The Freedom of Information Campaign blog that, according to Gordon Brown's on the governance of Britain (para 140), it is now government policy that Parliament should stay covered by the FOI Act.

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The Sunday Telegraph asked, under freedom of information, if I would publish the blog. But surely this is our internal space for a frank conversation? I can't see what it's got to do with the national press, can you?

That's a quote from the blog of Sir David Normington, the top civil servant at the 91Èȱ¬ Office, who has been blogging occasionally on his department's internal website for a year or so. But whatever Sir David's view of whether his blog is suitable for reading by outsiders, someone else at the 91Èȱ¬ Office has decided otherwise - because this extract is included in a released today under FOI. (It follows the disclosure of ).

So what does the latest intalment of the Permanent Secretary's blog tell us?

• he finds it frustrating to hear of big changes first in the media

• he regrets not being able to brief people beforehand about John Reid’s plan to split the 91Èȱ¬ Office (but as he says, ‘That’s politics, and sometimes we just have to accept that this is the real world we live in’)

• in six years as a Perm Sec (at Education before the 91Èȱ¬ Office) he’s worked with six Secretaries of State

• it takes a long time to learn enough facts about the 91Èȱ¬ Office to feel confident when preparing to be interrogated by the Commons 91Èȱ¬ Affairs Select Committee

• he likes offices to be tidy and staff to look businesslike (even if he suspects they have been told to smarten up for his visit)

• he has to devote a lot of time to sorting out the problems with the department’s internal IT system

• his New Year’s resolution was to tell more about the good stories his department is achieving - such as ‘the best performance on Ministerial correspondence ever’

More generally, the blog does give some insight into the struggles of a manager trying hard to maintain morale and accentuate the positive in an organisation which is famous for being told it's 'not fit for purpose' and where the computers apprarently don't work properly.

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I've written previously about the members of the Information Tribunal, who take many key decisions about freedom of information.

I provided details of the backgrounds of the lay members of the Tribunal. The Tribunals Service has now published on an updated listing of lay members and their qualifications.

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It's been announced that the minister directly in charge of freedom of information policy at the Ministry of Justice will be , a Brown loyalist with an interest in constitutional reform.

As with Jack Straw, he's been there before. He also had responsibility for FOI when he was a junior minister in 2001/2, in what was then called the Lord Chancellor's Department.

Earlier this year, as a backbencher speaking in a Westminster Hall debate, he his opposition to the government's planned restrictions on FOI. His view was that a better way to save money, which would avoid the consequences of the proposals, would be to have more efficient record management systems.

We wait to see whether he convinces his ministerial colleagues of that.

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Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act in the US.

The National Security Archive, a research organisation which uses FOI extensively, has marked the occasion with a published yesterday about the information requests that have been unanswered for longest. It shows the State Department has at least ten requests which it has not yet dealt with over fifteen years after they were received.

But don't despair - it doesn't mean they will never be answered, judging anyway from of information being disclosed eighteen years after it was asked for.

Still, some information is available at the click of a mouse. I've noted before the different attitudes in the UK and the US to the privacy of individuals' financial information, where those individuals are public employees. I've now come across (HT: Mike Ravnitzky) which allows you to search for the salary details of many US federal employees by name.

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When in 2005 John Prescott approved the controversial Vauxhall Tower development - a tower block to be built overlooking the River Thames in central London - he was acting against the advice of his officials.

We now know that thanks to today by the Department for Communities and Local Government. The Department had refused to disclose these documents, but was forced to following an important last month by the Information Tribunal under the Environmental Information Regulations.

This decision was another significant marker on the path towards the opening up of some official advice to ministers.

Of course it doesn't mean that Prescott was wrong to take the decision he did, or necessarily right either. As noted below, advisers advise and ministers decide. And sometimes decision-taking ministers are right to overrule their advising officials. But whether right or wrong, the decisions and the advice will sometimes now be less in the shadows than before - unlike anyone who lives next to Vauxhall Tower.

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While Gordon Brown has appointed FOI-sceptic Jack Straw to the post of Justice Secretary, it should also be noted that he has made the LibDem peer Lord (Anthony) Lester an adviser on constitutional reform. And Lester is a long-standing, committed enthusiast for freedom of information. Although I think someone once said that 'advisers advise, ministers decide'.

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