Guido Fawkes fascinates and repels politicians in equal measure – he gets great gossip but he’s not afraid to publish information that the political class would rather not make public. He’s also deeply involved in the Sunlight Centre for Open Politics which held a fringe meeting in Manchester focusing on the publication of their Shadow Kelly Report. They want MPs to be paid less, arguing that there is no shortage of applicants; they want to see recall mechanisms for corrupt MPs; and they want a special parliamentary debit card to be used for all expenses – anything that MPs buy with their allowances – that anyone can log into and examine the expenditure.
The fundamental premise of the Sunlight Centre is that transparency and freedom of information are the only way to keep politics honest.
The arguments they make apply across politics, not just to MPs’ expenses. MPs are spending our money when they pass the Budget and they’re making decisions about our future when they decide how to fund our public services.
This is why the Tories intend to publish every item of government expenditure costing over £25,000, and to publish data – such as that contained in the Red Book, or hospital ratings, or crime statistics – in a format that can be clicked, searched and manipulated. This means that anyone can understand real health outcomes, or relationship between revenue raised and public spending, or even down to the relationship between traffic cameras and road-safety spending. This concept of freedom of information has the potential to be the most radical change that a potential Conservative government could bring next year.
It would completely reverse the way that the Freedom of Information Act works. Currently the assumption is that the information we fund may only be released to us if we ask nicely. It should be available without us asking – and if a government wants to exempt something, it has to ask.
And yes, it is always easy for an Opposition to say that they would be honest and upfront – I remember Tony Blair saying much the same before 1997. But the pledge for a Freedom of Information Act was never really fleshed out, and what the Tories have pledged so far is much more detailed, much more straightforward and much more difficult to wiggle out of.
At the conference I talked to someone today who worried that there is still little detail on policy. My counter-argument is that there is a fair amount, but perhaps more importantly we do have a clear idea of the approach that a potential Conservative government might take. Generally speaking, they will focus on the result, not the process. They will generally aim for simplicity. They will generally aim for solutions at the most local level possible. They like ideas that promote responsibility and community. So a thousand freelance eyes checking over government expenditure is part of the overall arc of Conservative policy.
Obviously, there are questions still to be answered with the publications policy – for example, why a limit of £25,000? Is there a reason for that? How are they going to deal with the security services, or proprietary defence procurement? What will happen if a supplier refuses to allow details to be published? There will of course be stumbles along the way and it will take time for Whitehall and indeed potential Cabinet ministers (even those who have never been in government before) to accustom themselves to not automatically trying to keep secrets.
Let sunshine rule the day was always a soundbite that was laughed at when David Cameron used it in 2006 and 2007. Today we’re looking to a different kind of sunshine to make a difference.
This article first appeared in the Guardian this afternoon
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