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Home > Publications > Special Reports - Access to Official Information > AOI: Monitoring of the non-statutory codes of practice 1994-2005 > Foreword
1. The United Kingdom is a late convert to Freedom of Information (FOI) and the statutory ‘right to know’. The USA has had such legislation since 1966 and our Commonwealth relations, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, since 1982; Sweden has had it since 1776. We have slipped behind and it was not until the year 2000 that FOI finally made it to the statute book in this country: even then, it took a further four years for the individual rights of access under that Act to come into force.
2. The reason for this is not hard to find. British Government has traditionally, and rightly, been seen as secretive: generations of civil servants were brought up on the phrase ‘the need to know’. The traditional Whitehall attitude was pithily summed up in ‘Yes, Minister’ by the famous remark that open government is; ‘a contradiction in terms. You can either be open or you can have government.’
3. However, a significant shift in the public attitude towards government and the information that it holds about us was reflected by the passing of two major pieces of data protection legislation, in 1984 and 1998. Inevitably, the focus then began to shift towards the non-personal information held by public sector bodies, information about their processes, practices and policies; the enshrining of the European Convention on Human Rights into English law in 1998, giving statutory expression to a wide range of fundamental freedoms, helped to invigorate this development. The passing of a Freedom of Information Act became all but inevitable.
4. Before that happened, but in response to that changing mood, the Conservative Government under John Major decided, as part of the Citizen's Charter initiative, to introduce a non-statutory Code of Practice on Access to Government Information (the Code), which would apply to all those bodies falling within the jurisdiction of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (the Ombudsman). This Code came into effect in April 1994. Sir William Reid, the then Ombudsman, was asked, and agreed, to take on the role of investigating complaints that information which should have been released under this Code had been withheld. In June 1995, in his capacity as Health Service Commissioner, he assumed an identical role in investigating complaints under the very similar NHS Code of Practice (the NHS Code).
5. These two Codes ceased to have effect from 1 January 2005 when the individual rights of access under the FOI Act came into effect. This report looks back over this Office's stewardship of the Codes under three successive Ombudsmen, highlights some of the major cases that the Office has been required to deal with, and attempts to draw some key lessons about freedom of information and how it should be operated. I hope that the report, which I am making to Parliament under section 10 (4) of the Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967, will not only prove interesting in itself but will also offer some useful guidance at a time when over a hundred thousand public sector bodies are taking their first, tentative, steps into the brave new world of statutory open government.
6. Finally, I would like to pay tribute to all the staff who have contributed to this specialised area of work since 1994 and in particular to John Colmans, the main author of this report, for his leadership of the investigation team. Ann Abraham
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
May 2005
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