As often seems to happen when ministers are being hauled over the coals for their decision making, Cabinet Office record keeping policies have been back in the news.
As I reported in The Times back in May, the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee Lord Beamish criticised the department for routinely failing to keep records.
I noted from freedom of information disclosures that documents as important as a substantive report into the theft of Morgan McSweeney’s phone, or an internal government report finding a “case to answer” in relation to allegations of bullying by Antonia Romeo (which the Cabinet Office later found did not meet the bar of bullying), had not been retained.
But now this lack of record keeping appears to extend to how it intervenes in other departments’ responses to transparency requests.
If you turn your mind back to 2020 you may remember the Clearing House saga.
Disclosures obtained by news site OpenDemocracy revealed that the Cabinet Office had been sharing the information of journalists and campaigners (including mine) in relation to what requests they had been making, on so-called “round robin” lists.
Under the rules, government departments are supposed to handle requests for information based on their content, not who makes them.
However, in practice, requests from journalists are given special treatment, and political and institutional concerns are given undue consideration when departments try to fight or delay legally mandated disclosure.
The Clearing House was giving the Cabinet Office a way of tracking these requests across government, not only in its own department.
The revelations, largely spearheaded by the journalists who now run Democracy for Sale, led to a select committee inquiry, and an internal review by the Cabinet Office, and the conversion of the Clearing House into a “centre of excellence” which would slim back the coordinating focus and provide more technical advice to other departments.
Given ongoing challenges in obtaining disclosure from government departments in practice, I decided to try and find out how that “centre of excellence” was getting on.
I made a request for an array of basic documentation related to the “centre of excellence.”
The department claimed in its response that it didn’t exist, saying there was “no FOI team or function that is known as the ‘Centre of Excellence’”.
This is particularly confusing given Eiran Atkins Walsh, a senior Cabinet Office transparency official, told the Procedure Committee in an evidence session earlier this year that:
“We also operate a centre of excellence, which is an advisory function. Where a department has a particularly sensitive or tricky request, or where it cuts across one of the Cabinet Office’s equities, it can come to us and ask for our advice on that FOI request. If appropriate, we would give that advice.”
I amended my request again, to ask about the FOI policy unit, but this was then too expensive to find.
A slimmed down request provided the fact that the unit was supposedly of three people only.
However, how these people are trained, or guided, is a mystery.
The response claimed the department holds no guidance on how the policy unit should handle requests referred to it, other than some pretty limited public guidelines on why a request might be referred into the Cabinet Office, that could cover almost any request.
A further request for any training material given to new starters again turned up a blank.
The unit also appears not to be keeping records on the advice it issues.
According to the limited guidance that is published, at the end of each day, the round robin list is deleted, meaning there is now no record of the advice given by the department to others on which requests it advises departments to try to block.
It would appear that on the face of it, three staff members are operating this unit, having received no written training or detailed guidance on how to do so.
This seems unlikely to be the whole story.
Given recent briefing about trying to kneecap FOI, and McSweeney’s own views that FOI can impact government’s ability to do “strategic thinking“, this will reignite fears as to how officialdom is trying to assert central control of the system once again.
This would weaken the public right to know.
Picture credit: No 10 Flickr
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