Tony Blair's recent expressions of regret over his introduction of the Freedom of Information Act have been much chewed over in the news recently.
If I sense things correctly this is just one symptom of something rather bigger. If I discern things correctly, there are moves afoot to start reining back on the scope of the Act. I can't quite recall what prompted me to do so, but a few weeks back I sent an FoI request to the Justice Ministry, the Whitehall department responsible for the FoI Act. I asked what meetings ministers and officials had had concerning possible changes to the application of the Act in universities. The answer came back that they "didn't hold the information". On its own this would be nothing, although a firmer answer - "no such meetings" would have been more encouraging.
But then there was this a heartfelt piece on the subject of FoI from Professor Edward Acton:
[T]here are dilemmas. If data gathered by researchers is to be disclosable before they have completed work on it, issues of commercial and intellectual property become acute. Take the recent ruling by the Information Commissioner (made under the FOIA’s twin, the Environmental Information Regulation) to force Queen’s University Belfast to hand over painstakingly assembled Irish Tree Ring data. Are we to find that commercial companies (located anywhere in the world – our FOIA is wonderfully cosmopolitan) may secure the release of the unworked data of every UK university?
As an aside, I think Doug Keenan, the man who forced QUB's hand on this issue, might take issue with some of this. For example, the data is decades old and so can hardly count as "unworked". Also, according to Queens itself, it was stored on an electronic medium that is already virtually obsolete - floppy disks, suggesting that it was not actually being used. Readers of the Hockey Stick Illusion will recognise these issues and will know that the data should have been stored in a secure repository designed for the purpose, such as the International Tree Ring Database.
But to return to the original theme, there has now been another strong hint that the bureaucrats are on the move. Today's You and Yours programme on BBC Radio 4 discussed the question of Freedom of Information and featured someone from the University of Warwick declaring that he felt that universities should be exempt.
His reasoning for this involved a delicious misleading of the interviewer, Julian Worricker. He informed Worricker that Warwick receives 77% of its income "competively" and 23% direct from the state. This suggestion then led neatly into an insinuation that Warwick is 23% state funded (all those grants are competitive, right?), and since 23% is much less than some charities get from the state, universities should be exempt. Here, for those who are interested, is the relevant extract from the Warwick accounts:
Anyway, take a listen. The universities section starts at about 20 mins. Heather Brooke is featured later on, together with some minor discussion of climate.
Bishop Hill