Opposition is mounting to Labour’s mooted plan to curb the use of Freedom of Information requests. The latest transparency crackdown from this fake liberal government…
A double-header of FT stories this month saw one spuriously complain that FOIs were being used by China to gain intelligence and other two days later confirming that the government wants to crack down on FOI use. Proposals include dropping the ‘cost threshold’ which is meant to prevent requests taking too much of officials’ time…
That threshold has been sitting at £600 since the Act was introduced and has not risen in line with inflation, reducing the scope of FOIs in real terms anyway. The News Media Association – representing national and regional news organisations – has written to DCMS to oppose any reduction in that scope. Chief Executive Owen Meredith said in the letter:
“It is not routine or trivial requests that would be excluded. It is the most sensitive and significant ones – those involving complex decision-making, high-value contracts, safeguarding, multi-agency correspondence, and procurement.
Clearly, a reduction in the cost limit would restrict access and weaken scrutiny, and risk undermining the Government’s own commitments to openness and transparency.”
The Society of Editors has also come out against the proposals. Freedom of Information requests are a routine resource available to any member of the British public to retrieve non-sensitive information from the government in the interests of transparency and good governance. Save FOI…
Speaking on Times Radio, former Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke about overdiagnosis of mental problems:
“Let’s distinguish those who are really severely mentally ill, diagnosed with things that require prolonged medical and diagnostic treatment. My wife and I talk about this a lot, because she’s a retired GP, about the fact that you can be sad without being ill. You can be momentarily depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend’s just thrown you and you’re not mentally ill. You can even have mild issues, which can be dealt with with the right kind of support, but it doesn’t make you mentally ill. So we’ve got a real task, I think, to get the psychology, if you like, of this over. But there are things where you definitely need medical intervention, and there are other things where you need good friends, you need good connectivity, and you need a job.”