91Èȱ¬

I've written on numerous occasions in the past about the 91Èȱ¬ itself and freedom of information, and this topic is likely to get a lot more media and public attention over the next few days and weeks.

That's not only due to today's speech by director general Mark Thompson about transparency and the disclosures about pay and expenses of individual 91Èȱ¬ executives.

It's also because the 91Èȱ¬ is set to appear in the High Court next week to defend its stance on refusing to publish the internal "Balen report" on Middle East coverage and some production cost information, including EastEnders.

The Balen report case will now be considered on the central issue of whether to publish after a Jarndycean through a series of legal technicalities which went all the way to the House of Lords. The report itself is now five years old.

Much media attention will also doubtless now focus on the 91Èȱ¬'s reluctance to make public, with regard to high-profile and highly-paid presenters or "talent", the same kind of information about individual pay and expenses that it has committed itself to revealing about comparatively anonymous executives.

The 91Èȱ¬'s position is that its new policy on disclosure of management pay and expenses compares well with most public authorities and is at the forefront of the media sector. Yet it is clear from the , for example, that it will still come under fierce criticism for not releasing more data.

The corporation will argue that it is now well ahead of much of the public sector in its openness on management information, while it defends strongly the confidentiality of material related to programmes or editorial content.

While the 91Èȱ¬ has some concerns over commercial considerations, its stance on FOI and programme information stems from the "derogation" or exclusion it has under the for material kept for the purposes "of journalism, art or literature".

Quite what is covered by this derogation has been a matter of contention between the 91Èȱ¬, the Information Commissioner and the Information Tribunal in various cases (such as ). The High Court may now be about to set some precedents in this field which will determine what programme-related information the 91Èȱ¬ discloses in future.

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Over the weekend, the Telegraph produced some new revelations about numerous MPs who, , had over-claimed for their council tax.

This story makes more interesting another aspect of how the Commons blacked out expenses information which would seem to have no obvious implications for the security of MPs.

From the examples I've looked at, the Commons authorities have redacted the council tax valuation bands for MPs' second homes. Yet this data was disclosed in the material already officially released last year for the 14 MPs subject to a specific FOI request.

Thus, here is a council tax bill for John Prescott as disclosed last week:

And here is the version released in May 2008:

Similarly, it was disclosed last year that William Hague's flat in Westminster was in band H, while Sir Menzies Campbell's Westminster flat was band C and Mark Oaten's Lambeth flat was band B - but this information was redacted in the material published last week.

(Just to be clear, none of these four MPs was named by the Telegraph as among the dozens who it said had over-claimed for council tax).

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Here are some more particularly strange examples of information blanked out in today's from the House of Commons when it has already been officially published.

In May 2008, the Commons was forced to release material about the expenses of 14 MPs who had been the specific subject of FOI requests. Comparing this with today's disclosures throws up some particularly intriguing cases where information has been redacted, although it would seem to have no implications for the personal security of MPs.

We knew that today's material would not include correspondence with the fees office and notes of conversations, so for example it does not contain the record of John Prescott's unease about the "adverse press coverage" of his council tax payments [134Kb PDF].

But there are other differences with the previous disclosures which are much more surprising. As well as those affecting Gordon Brown, they include the following facts which were once public but are now apparently meant to be secret:

§

The fact that Margaret Beckett had a claim for plants and a pergola reduced

Today:

As disclosed in May 2008:

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The fact that Tony Blair was late paying his water bill

Today:

As disclosed in May 2008:

§

The model of Tony Blair's dishwasher

Today:

As disclosed in May 2008:

§

The fact that Sir Menzies Campbell preferred Commons officials to add up his taxi bills rather than doing the arithmetic himself

Today:

As disclosed in May 2008:

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Here are some of the discrepancies between the redacted information released today by the Commons about Gordon Brown's expenses and more extensive material they have already disclosed last year.

§

The first example relates to his Sky TV subscription which seems to have become a secret.

Today:

As disclosed in May 2008:

§

The second relates to the fact that one of his claims was made early for costs in the next financial year - this has been blacked out in today's material.

Today:

As disclosed in May 2008:

§

Update 1240: A Commons spokeswoman has told the 91Èȱ¬ that the Sky subscription information was removed since the fees office was allowed to take out all information on suppliers of services to MPs' homes in case the publication of that information helped to identify an MP's address or made it easier to breach security.

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Now the Commons has released the on MPs' expenses, much of the focus will actually be on what they still haven't released - the information which has been blacked out or "redacted".

While this event may be the culmination of the official process started by FOI requests made over four years ago in January 2009 2005, it's unlikely that FOI campaigners will be satisfied by today's disclosures. They are more likely to complain about the redactions.

Since the Telegraph has the full set of leaked data, it is best placed to draw attention to the discrepancies. It will doubtless do so.

Yet it's already clear from information that the 91Èȱ¬ possesses that some of the redactions seem peculiar and go beyond security considerations such as home addresses and signatures.

For example, in today's material about Gordon Brown's expenses, the Commons has redacted the fact that some bills were for Sky Television.

How do I know this? Not because of a leak - but because fuller details of his expense returns have already been officially released by the Commons in response to another FOI request in May last year.

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If you want to know more about why ministers are planning to exclude cabinet papers from the reach of freedom of information, then I strongly recommend you look at this new about government policy-making in the context of FOI.

Published last week, it was produced by the of University College, London, for the . Chapter 7 is based on interviews with current and former ministers and civil servants, and provides a fascinating insight into Whitehall unease about the workings of FOI.

The Information Commissioner and Information Tribunal have often been criticised by government insiders for not properly grasping the practical realities of policy formulation. The ICO commissioned this report to aid understanding of the policy process. It also contains a useful section on how cabinet papers are treated by freedom of information laws in other countries.

The researchers acknowledge they talked only to a small sample, but the attitudes to FOI of those interviewed were "markedly more negative than positive". They don't like the bad publicity that can result from FOI-based news stories and the use of FOI by pressure groups, they don't like the time it takes and the resources consumed in dealing with requests, and they don't like the central criterion in the law of assessing whether the release of material is or is not in the public interest. And some of them state that such consequences of FOI have taken them by surprise.

Here are some examples of what they had to say:

Overall I have a sense of disappointment about FOI. Perhaps I was naive - but I had seen it as a significant step forward to making us a more literate democracy. But the reality is that FOI is just seen generally as a means of attacking the government, whether the request be from an interest group or a journalist.

I do think it was a mistake to establish a "public interest" test, to be decided (except when the veto is exercised) by the Information Tribunal. I think it is extremely difficult for people without personal experience of central government to understand our concerns about how the release of documents will affect the way government works.

There is no public right to know what you decided not to do or what options you rejected. It's an enormously important principle that it's the final decision which needs transparency but how you get to it is not for disclosure.

This last point is one of those I found most striking. Interested parties outside government are often very keen to know what other policy choices were considered but discarded and why. However disclosing information about rejected options appears to make ministers and officials particularly uncomfortable.

The research team also examined the impact of FOI on the extent and honesty of government record-keeping. While one official states "I tend to take much more care than I might once have done to make sure the record is accurate and complete", another official who is concerned about pressure groups says:

In the future, I'll be making sure that there is nothing for them to get at. Part of our problem is that we have had a lot of internal material and our record keeping has been good. But I've told my team to make sure in future we minimise what we write down and minimise what we keep. So we'll be getting rid of e-mails quickly and we won't worry if the record is incomplete, so long as it contains nothing we wouldn't want to see released.

Yet in contrast there is at least one former cabinet minister who appears to want much more openness in the policy-making process. In Lord Falconer (who was once in charge of FOI) has challenged the fundamental notion of ministerial collective responsibility, arguing that dissenting ministers could openly voice disagreement before final decisions are made.

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The government is planning to introduce important new restrictions on access to cabinet and royal papers under freedom of information.

Under the new plans, cabinet papers would be absolutely exempt from FOI for a period of 20 years. This would include records relating to cabinet sub-committees.

This would be significantly tighter than the current position, where for most cabinet documents the decision on whether to release them depends on the "public interest test" - whether it is more in the public interest to disclose them in response to an FOI request or to keep them secret.

Royal papers will also be subject to an absolute exemption for 20 years, which in the case of the sovereign and the heir to the throne would be extended to five years after their death if that was later.

The Ministry of Justice has confirmed that this is what Gordon Brown meant when in he referred to "the need to strengthen protection for particularly sensitive material".

This will be accompanied by greater openness for government papers apart from cabinet and royal documents, reducing the "30 year rule" which governs when most of them will be open to the public to 20 years. This is the government's response to the recent of the rule.

Mr Brown also confirmed that FOI will be extended to cover a wider range of organisations. The justice minister Michael Wills had already indicated this last month.

The next step on this would involve consultation with those bodies that the government wants to bring within the scope of FOI, so it will be some time before any extension actually takes effect.

Mr Brown told MPs:

"Given the vital role transparency has played in sweeping aside the discredited system of allowances, and holding power to account, I believe we should do more to spread the culture and practice of freedom of information."

UPDATE 17.50: The Ministry of Justice has now given me this statement:

"The Dacre Review's recommendation that we consider - in parallel to adopting a new rule - whether certain categories of information deserve enhanced protection has prompted us to look at important safeguards in the current FOI Act. In relation to Cabinet information, and information relating to the Royal Household, it has become clear that those safeguards are insufficiently robust to protect our current constitutional arrangements, and need changing. We will be announcing the detail of these changes in our full response, to be published shortly.

We will be making two amendments to the exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act to ensure that our information access arrangements allow essential constitutional relationships and conventions to be preserved.

"Cabinet papers will be released much earlier than under the current rule, but will be subject to an absolute exemption under the Act until they are 20 years old.

"To ensure the constitutional position and political impartiality of the Monarchy is not undermined, the relevant exemption in the Freedom of Information Act will be made absolute for information relating to communications with the Royal Household that is less than 20 years' old. After that point - if the relevant Member of the Royal Family is still alive - then the exemption will continue to apply until five years after their death - on an absolute basis for the Sovereign and the Heir to the Throne, and on a qualified basis for other members of the Royal Family."

The Campaign for Freedom of Information is .

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This is a little off-topic maybe, but I've been thinking about one aspect of the which I've not seen mentioned anywhere else.

(If there's a connection with freedom of information, perhaps it's that electoral reform and FOI are both aspects of constitutional reform which some see as part of a democratic renewal process.)

Electoral reform is now the political agenda. It's widely accepted that a new voting system is such a fundamental change that it could only be adopted if a referendum on the idea was held first. But that surely prompts the question: what should be the voting system used in such a referendum?

The outcome could be very different according to that decision.

Suppose there were four options on offer for voting systems - the current First Past the Post system (FPTP), the Alternative Vote (AV) supported by some Labour electoral reformers, the Single Transferable Vote (STV) backed by the Liberal Democrats, and Borda, a points-based system advocated by those who see it as a more consensual approach. (A full explanation of each system is given below).

Suppose also that there are 100 voters and they happen to be divided into four opinion groups, with their order of preference for the voting system as follows:

So what would happen if there was a referendum with all four options on the ballot paper with the votes counted under the various systems (assuming no tactical voting).

If FPTP was used to count the result of the referendum, it would win; if AV was used it would win; if STV was used it would win; and if Borda was used it would win.

Under FPTP only the first preferences matter, FPTP has the most and it wins.

Under AV, the bottom two on first preferences (STV and Borda) are eliminated; FPTP gets no second preferences while AV gets 24 (from those who put STV first) to add to its 27 first preferences, so it scores 51, overtakes FPTP's 28 and wins.

Under STV, just Borda is eliminated on the first round. Since the 21 second preferences of those who put Borda first go to STV, on the second round STV has 45 votes and AV is now bottom as it still has 27. So AV is now eliminated, STV picks up another 27 votes in second preferences, so it now has 72 votes and beats FPTP, still on 28, in the final round.

Under Borda, FPTP scores 205 points, AV scores 257, STV scores 268, while it is Borda which seizes victory with 270.

Thus under this distribution of public opinion, each system wins if and only if the votes are counted in line with that system.

So what would be the fairest system for a referendum on electoral reform? Maybe what we need is a referendum to decide which voting system should be used in a referendum...?

Notes on each voting system:

• First-past-the-post (FPTP), the system currently used for UK general elections. Voters have one vote and the candidate with the most votes wins.

• Alternative vote (AV), as used in Mayoral elections, also known as the Supplementary Vote. Voters mark a first and a second preference. The first preferences are counted and all except the top two candidates are eliminated. The second preferences of the eliminated candidates are examined and where they are for either of the top two they are added to that candidate's total. The candidate from the initial top two with the highest total of first preferences plus second preferences transferred from eliminated candidates wins.

• Single transferable vote (STV). Since the point of such a referendum would be to choose one voting system, this case would be like STV in a single-member constituency where it works as follows. Voters list candidates in order of preference. After the first preference count, the bottom candidate only is eliminated, and his/her second preferences are added to the totals for the other candidates in line with those preferences. After this the candidate who is now bottom is eliminated, and more second/third preferences are transferred. Then the bottom candidate is eliminated and this process continues until only two are left and the candidate with the higher total of votes including transferred preferences is elected.

• Borda count - as with STV, voters list candidates in order of preference, but unlike STV Borda is a points-based system. If there are four candidates and the voter puts them all in order of preference, a first preference is worth four points, a second is worth three points, a third is worth two, and a fourth is worth one. The candidate with the highest points total wins.

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The , reported today, to make MMR jabs compulsory show how worried some public health professionals are about the number of young children who are not being given the injections.

As the 91Èȱ¬ has reported, documents we received under freedom of information revealed how the London Strategic Health Authority was so concerned that it raised the possibility of compulsory vaccination with the Department of Health.

The sensitivity of this issue is demonstrated by another document we have obtained through FOI.

This is a brief from the Department of Health and Central Office of information for a public relations contract worth between £300,000 and £400,000 to promote the MMR vaccine.

The brief states: "A high profile advertising campaign would not be the right way forward at this stage. It may run the risk of bringing the controversy and debate back into the headlines - igniting a media debate and giving further voice to those opposed to MMR. From research and past experience we know that one of the best strategies for reassuring parents is to keep MMR out of the headlines."

The document illustrates well the difficulties faced by the Department of Health in its campaign to maximise the take-up of the vaccine.

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It's still not clear what happened to the Air France Airbus 330 , but the airline has suggested that it may have been struck by lightning.

In fact, it is not uncommon for planes to be hit by lightning. In 2006 the 91Èȱ¬ made a freedom of information request to the for details of incidents from the previous five years where aircraft had been hit by lightning.

The CAA told us that in 2001 to 2006 there were 162 cases reported where a lightning strike had resulted in damage to an aircraft or malfunction of an essential service, for example navigation systems. This data only covers planes in the service of UK operators. (We don't have the information since 2006).

The CAA reports included two instances of an Airbus 330 being struck. In one case [105KB PDF] in 2005, it led to a temporary loss of flight indications such as airspeed and altimeters. In the other case [105KB PDF] in 2003, systems were mainly unaffected but on landing several holes were discovered along the side of the plane.

According to this material sent to the 91Èȱ¬ under FOI in 2006 by the CAA, EMB-145 aircraft (generally used on short-haul domestic flights) cropped up particularly often in the reports of lightning strikes.

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