Contribution
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for supporting one of the amendments that I tabled. I will reflect in due course on her last point, as I think she has something there. It is confusing that, in the Bill, a Minister can be challenged. I wonder quite how many complaints will go to the police about the assertions by the Prime Minister that Russia affected—or influenced, it seems—the outcome of the referendum on Brexit, when, later on, Ministers clarified by saying that the Government have repeatedly said that that influence had no impact; it may have been tried but it did not succeed. There is an odd thing going on here about what becomes opinion, debate or fact. To that end, very specifically, I would be grateful if the Minister would commit to publishing all the information given to the Prime Minister when he made assertions of a serious nature about the impact on the biggest ever electoral vote that happened—the Brexit referendum—and raised doubt about whether it could have been a wrongful outcome. For what it is worth, I voted remain; even still, the Prime Minister is on shaky ground in the way he has conducted that.
Coming back to my Amendments 66 and 69A, I thank the clerk, who I will not name, who helped me get this debate tonight. I wanted to amend the FoI Act and look at some other ways that declarations get made that I believe are in the public interest to fully understand—but this was the way to do it.
For a start, Amendment 69A is basically about the Houses of Parliament not being required to come up with an ethical code of conduct in how they give information. I think it is a bit odd that all the Parliaments are excluded. I want to understand why the Minister thought that it was correct that our own Houses do not have to obey a similar standard to other public bodies.
Amendment 66 is all about misleading the public. A couple of situations come to mind. One was the fire drill when we were evacuated from this Chamber, just last month or whenever it was. I tried to find out the learnings from that. I thought that would be in the public interest, in recognition that the number one reason that we keep being given for why we need a brand-new R&R project, these Houses being vacated and the spending of billions of taxpayers’ money is fire. I thought it would be reasonable to try to find out what the learnings were. When I put in an FoI, because I could not get the answer through normal routes, the entire section on learning from the drill was redacted. It was deemed sufficient for the Houses of Parliament to use their special FoI exemption, where you basically cannot appeal against the decision made.
This is where I start to worry: what else is being concealed? Why can we not have a somewhat more open approach to considering these sorts of issues? That topic may not be the most exciting in the world, but there are plenty of others where information is effectively withheld—not quite on a need-to-know basis, but almost as though we do not want the public to know some of the issues that are going on, so we just hold those things back.
More broadly, I am worried about how applying the provisions on misleading the public to Ministers will work in practice. For example, thinking about prison places, the magic figure of 500 is regularly cited by Ministers. On the Government’s own website, their statisticians basically say that you cannot rely on that number, so why do government spokespeople continue to use these phrases on behalf of Ministers when the Government’s own statisticians are saying that they cannot rely on that number? I am concerned that this will become almost a tit-for-tat escalation and that the police will be involved in trying to judge whether to arrest government officials and Ministers because of things they say.