Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill

I will in a moment. It was because of problems that I saw arising through my work on the Commission that I decided to table the Bill. Of course, the House of Commons Library might not have details of some of the problems that Members have experienced, but I am aware of many of them and I referred to one today. I have also been informed by other Members of problems that they have encountered when correspondence that they have written in confidence on behalf of a constituent to a public authority has been released on the say-so of someone else. Theoretically, if the law is to work properly, when a third party attempts to access a file containing a letter from a Member of Parliament to a public authority, an officer of the public authority should consult the Member and should look at the file, and then should make a decision on whether it should be released. If it contains personal information, the officer of the authority should invoke the Data Protection Act 1998 and should not release it. There are an awful lot of ““shoulds””—there are a lot of things that should happen—but unfortunately I have come across cases when they have not happened. If the word gets out more widely that some of the information Members of Parliament receive in confidence when talking to our constituents will get into the public domain—perhaps inadvertently, by accident or by negligence—that will be damaging to the relationship that we have with our constituents. It is not good enough to say, ““Well, if the current law is not working, how will this one improve it?”” If my Bill is scrutinised in the other place and is enacted, I hope that we will be able to circulate the news to all public authorities that correspondence with a Member of Parliament relating to a constituency matter is now sacrosanct. Therefore, if Members wish to release correspondence, we make that decision. I am perfectly content for Members of Parliament to decide to press release their letters to constituents if they wish—I am content for them to release anything they wish. However, the decision on whether letters relating to our constituents are released should not be made on the whim of a chief constable or in the judgment of a junior clerk in one of 2,000 public authorities who will now have the right to determine these matters. I have in my file records of cases from Members of various parties about worries that they have had on the release of their correspondence.