Localism Bill

My Lords, I am tempted to wonder how many pieces of information might have been released during the noble Lord’s exposition of his amendments—doubtless, very many. I hope that my noble friend will consider sceptically the case that has been made. I am a strong exponent of the principle of openness—we discussed whether there should be a presumption of openness in our debate on a previous group of amendments. I think that I heard my noble friend give a commitment that it should apply to meetings. The noble Lord is clearly a significant enthusiast for freedom of information, for which I commend him, but again I hope that my noble friend will be sceptical when she examines these amendments, which not many of us have had the opportunity to look at in detail. I asked my chief executive how much freedom of information implementation had cost my authority so far in the past year, to which the response was £120,000. That does not sound like very much but it approaches 1 per cent of the council’s discretionary budget, outside schools. The freedom that has been given is important, but it must be exercised in proportion. In my experience, quite often when someone pursued a freedom of information request they would have been given the answer through the front door if they had simply asked the question, although that clearly would not have been so in the case to which the noble Lord refers. The noble Lord’s Amendment 52A intends to take these procedures into contractor arrangements, subcontractor arrangements, and doubtless sub-sub-subcontractor arrangements. It would end up creating such a cat’s cradle of bureaucracy for these arrangements that we might well end up, as the noble Lord himself recognised, deterring small businesses from putting themselves within this embrace. I reiterate that I strongly support the idea of freedom of information in principle, but I hope that when my noble friend considers this group of amendments she will, as I said, exercise due scepticism—on behalf of those of us, as publicly accountable authorities, who have to administer open systems, which we do—about the costs that local authorities, and through them their contractors and subcontractors, might incur. With £120,000, I could have created a fairly large number of very useful public assets. Doubtless some of the requests were extremely worth while, but there should be nothing in excess.