Unlikely alliances are being forged in a bid to preserve the Freedom of Information Act

Bob Kerslake, head of the Civil Service until last year, will lend his voice to those defending FOI. He will be joined by Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights campaigners Liberty, and Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance

Shami Chakrabarti will be defending the Freedom of Information Act (Getty)

It’s hard to imagine the lofty Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, and the squat figure of Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party, arms linked and striding out together in common cause.

Less than four years ago, a seething Mr Dacre gave evidence to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the press, a public process which he deeply resented and one that Mr Watson, a primary mover in uncovering the phone-hacking scandal, was instrumental in bringing about.

Yet the threat to the Freedom of Information Act has brought this unlikely pairing together. And many more are allying with them. It is 11 years since the public gained the “right of access” to information held by public authorities. It has transformed the relationship between those who administer public services and those who ultimately fund them.

Yet suddenly those new-won rights are in danger of being lost. The Independent Commission on Freedom of Information, set up by David Cameron in July, is widely feared to be intent on weakening the Act.

The commission’s membership includes two former hard-line Home Secretaries, Conservative Lord Howard and Labour’s Jack Straw (who has already expressed regret at his role in drawing up the original legislation). Another member of the five-strong team is Lord Carlile, who accused The Guardian of a “criminal act” in publishing the revelations of whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, has claimed that the Act is being misused by the media to “generate stories”.

Local authorities have weighed in to the debate with a submission to the commission calling for FOI requests to be subject to fees and limited to eight hours research (down from 18). The requests are a costly “burden” amounting to “lazy journalism”, councils argue. The resistance contains a thinly hidden suggestion that this new flow of information is harming vital services – councils are being diverted from social care, hospitals from medical work and police forces from fighting crime.

I don’t buy any of it. Early studies of the Act showed that most FOI requests are made by members of the public or businesses, with a small proportion coming from the media. Journalists have always sought information from public bodies. The difference now is that institutions are under a clear obligation to co-operate.

A generation ago, the press offices of local councils, health authorities and police forces were a skeleton of those today. In the case of the police, it was common for working officers to field calls from reporters.

Today, when a premium is placed on public reputation, local council communications departments take a large slice of budgets and employ some 3,500 staff (76 at Manchester City Council alone). Councils have come to regard themselves as publishers, producing their own print titles with an emphasis on positive news and the capacity to weaken local papers by taking advertising revenue.

The belligerent former Communities Secretary Eric Pickles – urged on by newspaper companies – curbed this trend. But social media is the new key platform for local authority press officers, for whom news management rather than information provision is often the over-riding concern. They resent spending time on FOI requests, which the Local Government Association claims have grown by 39 per cent in the past three years.

Press Gazette, which has campaigned admirably on the new threat to FOI, revealed figures last month that suggested that councils were exaggerating the strain on their resources. Bristol City Council said it spent £150,000 on FOIs out of an annual communications budget of £2.5m. Essex County Council spent £185,000 out of a budget of £3.2m. Plenty of money left there for interacting on Facebook and Twitter.

As for resistance to FOI in central government (where the 3,650 press officers and spin doctors almost match the number of journalists in Fleet Street) and Mr Grayling’s comment that the media is seeking to “generate stories”, what does he expect? The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, surely one of the country’s experts on how and if data should be shared, has rejected the Cabinet Secretary’s fears. Mr Graham spoke of a “general mandarin panic” and warned that diluting the Act risked taking Britain back to the “dark ages” and undermining democracy.

Today, a former leader of those mandarins, Bob Kerslake, head of the Civil Service until last year, will lend his voice to those defending FOI. He will be joined by Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights campaigners Liberty, and Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Not always ideological fellow travellers, those last two.

Mr Isaby is angry that Mr Cameron is seemingly attacking FOI after promising that his Government would create a “new era of transparency”. The Alliance has used FOI requests to expose stories including the Government’s knowledge of critical problems in the rail network last Christmas, and the NHS giving contraception to girls aged 10. These speakers have been brought together by the campaigning Mr Watson, who wishes to “hear from people who use FOI as well as the organisations who receive FOI requests, in an attempt to find out whether the Act works and how it can be improved”. He wants the Act “strengthened” and complains that the commission is “stuffed with experts who’ve publicly said they don’t like FOI”.

The Labour deputy finds himself at the shoulder of Mr Dacre, whose paper last Thursday carried the front page headline “Just who do they think they are?” as it criticised the “so-called public servants” seeking to keep the public “in the dark about their greed, incompetence and corruption”. The Mail described the commission’s work as “an insidious plot”.

Mr Dacre has written to the commission saying that plans to increase government secrecy are “entirely antipathetic to the mood of the times, in which voters expect more, not less transparency in the way they are governed”. He noted that the £5.6m annual cost of FOI to central government was £700,000 less than the outlay on ministerial limousines.

The Mail has highlighted its use of the Act in exposing the salaries, expenses and perks of public officials. The legislation has been used by other papers to expose MPs’ expenses claims, cracks in the nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point B, the killing of Afghan civilians by British troops, the Prince of Wales’s lobbying of ministers and the means used by Sir Cyril Smith to block police investigating his abuse of children.

Digging out the facts that lead to these revelations can be a lengthy process for public officials. But sensible open-government campaigners such as Scottish Information Commissioner Rosemary Agnew recognise that FOI costs can be greatly reduced by a simple change of approach: public bodies should use technology to release more information in the first place. Embracing an “open data” policy would create a “paradigm shift”, she says: “Instead of focusing on FOI requests all the time, let’s start focusing more and more on the proactive side.”

Hear, hear!