18 March 2022

Published in

Warning: Graphic Content

10 min readMar 18, 2022

FOIA alarm

It would be fair to say current expectations of government’s performance on freedom of information are not high. That’s particularly true of the Cabinet Office — there is currently a parliamentary inquiry into their approach, after all.

But I was still surprised with the response to my request for details of government’s Cabinet Committees and Parliamentary Private Secretaries. (Cabinet Committees are groups of ministers able to take binding decisions on behalf of government — a vital bit of constitutional wiring — while PPSs are unpaid assistants to ministers and ministerial teams, less the first rung on the ministerial ladder than the ground beneath it.)

FOIA eyes only: the Cabinet Office response to my request for details of Cabinet Committees and Parliamentary Private Secretaries.

Apparently publishing these lists — which government has traditionally published (if often late), and details of which it is happy to brief to the press — could threaten ‘the delivery of effective government’. (You might be forgiven for asking just how many lists this government has been sitting on for the last few years.) The Cabinet Office has said it therefore needs more time to apply a public interest test to the request.

Withholding this basic information points in one (or more) of three directions: that the default response these days is simply to withhold information, whatever the request; that Cabinet Office genuinely thinks that us knowing which ministers sit on the committees driving work in its priority areas and a collated list of ministerial aides would damage the policy-making process; or that the committee system has crumbled to such an extent that either publishing this information would demonstrate that, or it cannot easily be pulled together.

I wouldn’t describe any of those options as reassuring.

Intriguingly, the minister for the Cabinet Office told Angela Rayner — and therefore parliament — that ‘GOV.UK is updated regularly with the list of Cabinet Committees, their terms of reference, membership and who chairs each Committee.’ He might want to tell his department’s FOI team that. And he might also want to reflect on whether their initial response, and the fact I’ve had to resort to FOI for this basic information in the first place, means he should correct the parliamentary record. Because ‘updated regularly’ with this information, GOV.UK is not.*

As for everything else:

Here’s a thread of some highlights from my conversation with Sir David Norgrove, chair of the UK Statistics Authority. You can watch the whole thing here. And to note: a review of the UKSA is one of many things in this letter from Downing Street chief of staff/Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Steve Barclay.
On the subject of data-related events at IfG, keep an eye on the Data Bites page for details of our 28th edition, happening on Wednesday 6 April.
I’m hosting the second edition of the world’s first/best/only data gameshow at the Alan Turing Institute’s AI UK conference next week. You can watch the first edition, from last year’s ODI Summit, here.
I’m really pleased to be supporting the Royal Statistical Society’s Covid-19 evidence sessions — you can sign up for the first of the events, on the communication of data during the pandemic, now.
If you’d like to respond to mySociety’s TICTeC Labs call for proposals on showcasing public-private civic tech success stories, you have ten days left. And six days to sign up for the latest Civic Tech Surgery in the series, on accessing quality information.
I like it when one of my lists comes in handy. This week, two of them did — on data-related podcasts (etc), and on data-related reading. As ever, please add anything I’ve missed.
Lots of interesting reaction to Jonathan Slater’s report on how to fix Whitehall’s broken policy machine, which recommends greater transparency among other things. Though as Jerry Fishenden notes, the absence of anything on data, digital or technology is a bit surprising. Try Lewis’ 2020 IfG report on Policy making in a digital world for more on that.

No newsletter next week, as I’m having a full-on case of Freelancer’s March, as organisations look to spend budgets before the end of the financial year (and for which, many thanks, organisations).

I’m increasingly aware of how much time it’s taking to put this newsletter together, given other commitments. If you might be interested in sponsoring future editions of Warning: Graphic Content, please email me here. Or consider buying me a coffee here.

Have a great weekend
Gavin

*I sense much FOIA in you, etc.