Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill

I, too, shall be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker. The amendments have had a comprehensive airing this morning. I want to reiterate what I said in Committee: that the Freedom of Information Act 2000 has been a significant success. It has resulted in the release of information that is of real interest to the public. Most importantly, it has increased the transparency of public authorities. As the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) has just said, so much information is now available through Government Departments and the Houses of Parliament on websites and so on that a great deal of information is available to people. The amendments are inconsistent with the intention of the Bill, and I suspect that the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), in whose name they stand, would agree. The question for the House today is whether the House authorities should be covered by the 2000 Act; that is the thrust and question behind the amendments. There are very few examples of public authorities being covered for only some of the information that they hold—those that relate to the protection of the journalistic integrity of the BBC, for example. There may be a whole new debate on that, but I do not intend to go into it today. Seeking to alter the scope of the 2000 Act to cover only certain types of information, such as Members’ expenditure, for example, would risk confusion within the organisations that have to administer and regulate compliance with the Act. The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk read out some of the letter that Mr. Speaker wrote to the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (David Maclean); as it stated, the authorities of the House are already very open and already publish information on Members’ expenses. The right hon. Gentleman read that letter out in Committee and I am sure that he will want today to repeat the commitment given by Mr. Speaker on that issue and say that the House would continue to publish information on expenses if the Bill were enacted.