High Court win against the House of Commons Commission was a landmark victory for freedom of information campaigners

Freedom of information (FoI) brings clarity to the rule of law, obliging governments to reveal how they operate and make decisions. Operations and decision-making become less arbitrary and more professional. Decisions are based on empirical evidence rather than subjective fancies. Informal lobbying, favouritism and personal prejudices are replaced by reason that can withstand public scrutiny.

Decisions backed up in this way are more likely to be accepted by the populace. It is not a coincidence that PR budgets in government agencies have increased in inverse relation to the drop in public confidence. Spin and PR do not maintain public trust in the long term – they are at best short-term bandages. The problem at the heart of most so-called public services is a lack of direct accountability.

I point to my recent High Court victory against the House of Commons Commission as a cautionary tale to those public servants who fail to accept this simple democratic principle. MPs claim from the taxpayer up to £23,000 a year for keeping a second home wholly for the purpose of their official duties. I argued that the public had a right to see the receipts behind these claims; it is what any other person in business must provide to their boss. The Commons, by clinging to secrecy and fighting this request for three years, did more to damage the reputation of MPs than any scandal would have done. If they had nothing to hide, why were they so determined to keep the expense system secret? The reason became obvious when the Information Tribunal criticised the additional costs allowance (ACA) expense system as ‘deeply unsatisfactory’, with a ‘shortfall both in transparency and in accountability (that) is acute’.

This system could only survive in secrecy. As soon as the light of public scrutiny was upon it, its many failings were revealed and the real problems could be addressed.

My legal team, Hugh Tomlinson QC at Matrix Chambers and Louis Charalambous at Simons, Muirhead & Burton, acted on a pro bono basis until the Commons made their rash appeal to the High Court. Costs are generally awarded in High Court cases, so we moved to a conditional fee agreement (CFA) seeking full costs if we won. I believe this is an important new remedy to counteract the lack of enforcement coming from the Information Commissioner’s office. Certainly, the House of Commons Commission had no regard for spending several hundred thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money to stop the public knowing how public money is spent. Through CFAs, the citizen has a means of redressing this imbalance. The nub of the Commons’ argument was that the speaker had written to MPs prior to the full implementation of the FoI act telling them that bulk totals of expenses would be revealed annually in the publication scheme. Therefore, MPs had an ‘expectation of privacy’ that nothing else would be disclosed. The High Court threw out this nonsense: ‘It is inconceivable that MPs could expect to conduct their affairs on the basis that recently enacted legislation did not apply to them’.

The Commons lost and I received all the documentation I sought. The receipts for all MPs’ expenses will be published this autumn.

It is through the court system (most notably the Information Tribunal and in rarer cases the High Court) that the public’s right to know is being defined. Accessing official information is an area of law where many precedents need to be set. The opportunity is there for any ambitious lawyer to make a name for themselves in expanding the boundaries.

Heather Brooke is the author of Your Right to Know. See www.yrtk.org.