Freedom of Information Consultation = danger of losing it

I was alerted to this FOI Commission Consultation today by 38degrees and I jumped straight on it.  My views are from the hip, so may not be completely thought through or expressed as elegantly as I might prefer - however 'truth before beauty' is usually a good call.  The first 2 questions, in orange, are from 38degrees, and the rest, numbered, are from the government.

Subject: Submission to call for evidence by Commission on Freedom of Information
To: foi.commission@justice.gsi.gov.uk

Why do you think Freedom of Information should be protected?

The government is elected by and accountable to the UK citizens - not just once each 5 years but every single day. They and their selected providers are spending the citizens' money. If their decisions and actions are not transparent then the citizens cannot hold them to account. We have a participatory democracy where charities and volunteers contribute significantly to the well-being of the country and its citizens. Without transparency that participation is in danger of being ineffective, mis-directed and eventually lost.

How do you think government transparency could be improved?

Transparency should start at 100% and only be reduced in specific areas where there is a very strong case agreed by a body independent of government. Private companies providing public services should be under the same scrutiny as if it were the government providing those services.

Question 1: What protection should there be for information relating to the internal deliberations of public bodies? For how long after a decision does such information remain sensitive? Should different protections apply to different kinds of information that are currently protected by sections 35 and 36? (Note: ‘Sections 35 and 36’ of the Act cover policy formulation, communications between ministers, and information that would affect the free and frank giving of advice or expression of views.)

It is essential that citizens can see how all decisions have been made. How else can they hold the decision-makers to account? There should be no delays in making this information available except in the case of national security or personal privacy.

Question 2: What protection should there be for information which relates to the process of collective Cabinet discussion and agreement? Is this information entitled to the same or greater protection than that afforded to other internal deliberative information? For how long should such material be protected?

I am not interested in Cabinet discussions - the horse-trading, back-biting and manoeuvring - I am interested in traceability of decisions and actions.

Question 3: What protection should there be for information which involves candid assessment of risks? For how long does such information remain sensitive?

Risk assessments should be made fully available. The citizens want to know first that such a risk assessment has been properly done, and second what the government's view of the risks is.

Question 4: Should the executive have a veto (subject to judicial review) over the release of information? If so, how should this operate and what safeguards are required? If not, what implications does this have for the rest of the Act, and how could government protect sensitive information from disclosure instead?

The executive veto should stay in place for very rare circumstances where security is affected, and it must be subject to a strong and effective judicial review which starts with the question "what are the risks to national or personal security of releasing this information".

Question 5: What is the appropriate enforcement and appeal system for freedom of information requests?

The current system of appeal through the Information Commissioner seems ok to me.

Question 6: Is the burden imposed on public authorities under the Act justified by the public interest in the public’s right to know? Or are controls needed to reduce the burden of FoI on public authorities? If controls are justified, should these be targeted at the kinds of requests which impose a disproportionate burden on public authorities? Which kinds of requests do impose a disproportionate burden?

Organisations should not have to pay (companies, accredited media, charities and so on). There could be a small charge for individuals to discourage frivolous requests. A request should never be denied on the basis of its cost; that simply rewards inefficiency with secrecy. Technology and modern governance should facilitate the provision of information without undue cost.

The Greek conundrum - DEBT FREEZE is a sensible way out

Dateline 16 Jun 2015:  It is crunch time … again, but perhaps even more real this time.  I don’t see how Greece and the troika of main creditors can kick the can ever further down the street.

According to this CAPX article Greece is running a primary surplus, and therefore without the debt mountain could begin to sort itself out.  An article in The Telegraph agrees 

So why don’t the troika take the following very simple approach: debt freeze by which I mean they forego past and future interest payments (all the loans really should have been interest free in the first place) and they leave the debt in place to be repaid starting in, say, 5 years time and spread over 15 years.  Apparently the ECB will return interest paid as & when Greece runs a primary surplus, and I can see the reason for incentives given Greece’s past record, but this does not help the cashflow.  At the same time Greece should leave the Eurozone, but stay in the EU - this would give them the fiscal flexibility to sort themselves out.

Surely this debt freeze approach is better than cancelling the debt, wherein the creditors lose their money and other countries may be tempted to follow suit – this way the money and the debt still exists, it is just locked away for a long time.  A bit like my bank when it gave me a mortgage many years ago.  If a daughter of mine had a financial crisis,  this is the kind of thing I would do – I certainly would not seek to make money out of her distress by charging her interest, and yes I would lose what interest I might get from having it in my savings account, but that’s what parents or Eurozone partners are for, isn’t it?

I wonder if the flaw in this is that, whereas I have the actual money and can leave it with my daughter while I don’t need it and she does, I suspect the troika loans are not real money – it is money borrowed from somewhere else with a servicing cost attached to it.  So they need interest payments from Greece to make their own interest payments, and round and round it goes. 

TTIP makes me crosser and crosser

Here is my email sent to my London MEPs today, via 38degrees:

Dear Claude Moraes MEP, Jean Lambert MEP, Charles Tannock MEP, Lucy Anderson MEP, Gerard Batten MEP, Mary Honeyball MEP, Syed Kamall MEP and Seb Dance MEP,

I have only so far had a response from Gerrard Batten, for which I thank him, to my earlier email on this subject.  

The postponement of the vote today only reinforces the feeling that we are all being manipulated by vested interests, instead of operating a representative democracy.  

Whilst I am in favour of reducing red tape and harmonising regulation where this maintains appropriate safety and quality, I have seen nothing to convince me that the supposed benefits of TTIP are in any sense achievable; boosting economies and employment on both sides of the Atlantic to the levels claimed by CEPR looks like sales gloss.  

On the food front it is ridiculous to encourage a huge increase in food miles as for example we export beef to the USA and import their chickens - how does that fit in with climate change management? 

The risks of TTIP are very real however, that business interests will compromise our democracies.   

Please tell me whether you will show your opposition to TTIP  - and in particular ISDS - when you get a chance to vote? Or, please can you pass on these views to MEPs who will be voting?

Please represent the views of your constituents.

I look forward to hearing from you

Post Election blues ... now pick ourselves up quickly and act

I didn't post until now, as in my sleep-deprived and emotional state I might have just said "aaaaaaaaaagh".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an automatic anti-Conservative - the party and/or Cameron have done some good things - gay marriage, and at least containing the deficit (though not as much as they say, and the national debt is still increasing as is the interest we pay on it, and they are not doing it fairly).  They also have some really dodgy policies like selling off more council/association housing stock when we have nothing like enough social housing capability.  Don't get me started on privatisation of public services with inadequate public governance.

The next 6 months are crucial - we have to be on our toes, especially as all the Opposition parties, due to what I see as selfish, cowardly actions, are now effectively leaderless and focused inward on themselves.  It falls to the active electorate to provide checks and balances, swiftly and loudly, especially to defend the elderly, the vulnerable and the disabled.

There are many channels for this, including 38degrees and VoteforPolicies that I support. The latter are planning to track adherence to the manifesto, and as the Tories have a slim majority it's their manifesto that will be monitored.  There are a myriad of other channels large and small for expressing opinions to and exerting pressure upon our elected representatives - remember, as a nation this is what we have done, it's a democracy, we did this, we elected a Conservative government - and ideally this myriad channels would somehow come together and be immensely more powerful through acting in a coordinated way. That won't happen, not least because we also have a myriad of opinions and suggestions and so will never speak with one voice.

All democracy is skewed in favour of those who can be bothered to be involved.  What result might we have got if the one-third of the electorate who didn't vote had instead made it to the polling booth or postbox?  Unfathomable, yet certainly more representative.  What result if we had voted for a version of PR?  Again unfathomable, yet certainly deeply in the constitutional legitimacy coalition space that was being predicted just 24 hours ago ( a long time in politics, apparently - and also in media analysis).

What should the active few seek to do?  Overturn or block policies that are clearly bad? That's not very democratic, having a tiny minority alter things that a wafer-thin majority of two-thirds of the electorate on a first-past-the-post system using historical random constituencies have voted for ... if any of them read the manifesto.  Despite my attempted irony there, I do think that small pressure groups focused on policy change are undemocratic.  

Instead the role of the active few, their focus and priority, should be to expose first the policies, as many of them are hidden away under mounds of innocuous fluffy verbiage. Then expose all the information relating to those policies, in terms of background, analysis, experience elsewhere, risks, possible outcomes and side-effects - drag all of this, blinking, into the sunlight.  Then facilitate discussion thereupon on the widest possible basis.  Whereupon the elected representatives will have no choice but to do the generally accepted best, or least worst, thing if they want to be loved and one day re-elected.  And they do, they really do.  That, my friends and others, will be the least-flawed version of democracy in action.

Tax spend shock - servicing the National Debt - the General Election

HMRC sent me an email recently announcing "Your personalised tax summary is now available online, showing how much tax and National Insurance you have paid, and how it is spent by the Government".  Hmm - interesting, I thought.

The breakdown of how my tax is spent is VERY interesting:

25% on Welfare
19% on Health
13% on Education
12% on State Pensions
7%  on National Debt interest - whoa, £1 in every £14 of my taxes is used to service the nation's debt ... this is more than is spent on Defence (no, I'm not defending that), Justice, Transport, Business Industry, Government Admin, Culture. Environment, Housing and utilities, Overseas aid, and lastly (at 1/10 of those interest payments) the UK Contribution to the EU budget.

This shows to me very plainly why as a country we must reduce our Debt.  Yet if I understand correctly, all the austerity so far is only reducing the rate of increase in the Debt.  We have to do more than balance the books, we need a surplus to pay off the loans and we need this to be sustainable over decades.  

If this is achievable at all, then it needs intelligent, far-sighted strategic management which does not rely on the magic fairy of growth (which is no longer reliable), does not rely on market forces (because we want a fair society, not one at the mercy of the greedy and unscrupulous), and does not rely on passing the challenges and solutions up to a semi-federalised Europe (because that will lead to less visibility and less direct action just when we need more of those things).

I am mortified that my generation, now approaching retirement, has lived well at the expense of future generations.  So who am I going to vote for in May 2015?!  I honestly don't know.

Government gridlock could be Democracy breakthrough

Check this blog on the Royal Society for Arts, Manufacturing & Commerce (RSA) website:

Political Gridlock ... may be no bad thing

Here's my comment on that blog:

A wonderful example of positive thinking ... I like it ... I am heartened by it.

The challenge is how we get the media to report a breakthrough for democracy rather than a breakdown of government.  

My suggestion is to throw it at all the walls so that some of it may stick. Send a concise version, containing a call to action, with a link to this blog, to all political parties, to all media channels, and use public online channels such as 38degrees as well as the usual suspects to reach the people.

The step before that could be to get endorsement from known, trusted, influential and politically neutral (or at least not toxic) people - professional people, not celebrities.

theguardianlive event on NHS future - mixed reviews

In summary:  nice try, Guardian, but over-ambitious with establishment platform and a chair who was not strong enough.  A lot of aspirational statements, quite a bit of politics, and precious little on WHAT should be done and most importantly HOW to do it.  Flawed yet stimulating, ultimately frustrating. Nothing new that was significant.

The event was organised by The Guardian as part of their GuardianLive series was on 20 Jan 2015 in Conway Hall, London.

It must have been a sell-out (£15 a seat) as the hall was stuffed - the audience predominantly white, middle-class from what I could see, yet not over-polite ... there was some shouting as people lost patience with the proceedings.

Meeting Organisation
The Guardian was over-ambitious in expecting everyone to load a special app on smartphones and participate in polls and enter questions and rate questions online during the meeting.  There were 6 or 7 poll questions, yet only one was briefly examined. Many questions were entered yet only the top 2 were addressed as one item together.  The app on my android phone did not have all the functionality compared to the iphone of my neighbour.  A number of people objected that they were disenfranchised by not having smartphones or not being willing to load the app. The chair allowed a show of hands on the one poll examined, to placate the crowd. I personally find it hard to vote online and type questions when listening intently to speakers.  
Lesson Learned: do less and do it well, anticipating people's reaction to the use of technology.  The polls could have been available before the meeting started, and a separate screen used to display the results continuously - that would have been valuable rather than distracting.

Meeting Management
It will always be frustrating when 2 days worth of debate is crammed into less than 2 hours, however the chair (Denis Campbell, Guardian health Correspondent) was not strong enough.  He allowed the panel to give long answers, sometimes off the point of the question, and when the audience lost patience and started shouting comments he looked briefly like a rabbit in the headlights.  He also took up time asking his own questions when the audience was gagging to ask theirs. he only took audience questions with 15 minutes left of the meeting time.
Lesson Learned: the chair of course needs to be knowledgeable in the field, but also independent from the debate - Denis had too much 'skin in the game' to be able to sit back and manage the debate to best effect.  Short answers must be enforced.  Get the audience involved early.

Debate Panel
Here are my key notes against the main panel members - 3 establishment figures and 1 very well-connected thinktank CEO - harsh perhaps but this is what stayed with me:

Dr Mark Porter (BMA) - stop the use of markets, it has failed - no more re-organisations

Sir Bruce Keogh (NHS England) - prevention is better than cure (otherwise I heard political aspirational statements)

Rt Hon Norman Lamb MP (LibDem Minister of State for Care and Support at the Department of Health) - next 5 years is crunch time - want to pool health and social care by area, give control to that area

Julia Manning (CEO 2020health thinktank) - we cannot do everything, technology costs too much (gets my vote as 'most insightful of the evening', which does not say much for the others)

Lesson Learned:  the audience around me felt rather 'talked down to' by the great-and-good panel, influential and eloquent though they are.  I think the audience would have preferred to have one or two NHS practitioners from the front line on equal footing up on the platform.  All the staff are 'amazing' and engagement is the thing, so let's have them up there alongside the top brass.

Content
I heard some figures that are surprising on the face of it:  NHS is one sixth of national public expenditure, yet UK (or was that England) spends less than the average across Europe (per head, or as %age of what was not stated), and we only spend half what USA spends (ah but you cannot compare tax-funded free at point of delivery with an insurance based system surely?!).

The two top-rated audience questions (and the only ones taken by the panel) were about privatisation.  The audience is dead against it.  Julia Manning pointed out that it is not a simple black & white issue - she as an optician was self-employed and contracted to the NHS.  Much IT provision is out-sourced. These are rather different to a private equity owner dumping a non-profitable secondary care facility.

The audience wanted to talk about TTIP - they were rabidly against it.  The panel, specifically Norman Lamb, asked them to be sure of their facts and reassured them that the EU had written to our government confirming that the NHS is not affected by TTIP.

The Health and Social Care Act came in for much general stick - I didn't hear anyone specifically defending it.  Norman Lamb pointed out that the PFI schemes are effectively just mortgages with huge repayments by government to private sector - that's an interesting perspective, and my respect for this MP is growing.

No one, apart from Julia Manning in passing, addressed what I see as the elephant in the room:  we should be talking about the next 5 years as tactical - the strategy should be the next 25 years;  the current and predicted growth in NHS funding is simply not sustainable - economic growth will not magically solve the problem (that's not sustainable either); therefore we need a really radical review and prioritisation of health and care services across the board, with some serious expectation management; no government is ever going to do that because it's political suicide; so we need a beefed-up equivalent of the Office for Budget Responsibility for the NHS, to provide the logical advice and take the blame for the (correct) difficult decisions.

Ok, I have finished on an off-the-wall suggestion, and the above notes are incomplete and of course it is a personal view - that's the whole point.