FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AND PRIVACY (Hansard, 16 February 1977)

§ Mr. Tom Litterick (Birmingham, Selly Oak)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to further the free interchange of opinion in the United Kingdom by providing for greater public access to official information; to safeguard the privacy of personal information collected and retained for official purposes; to make provision with respect to the keeping, disclosure, correction and dissemination of such information; to make further provision for the content and accuracy of certain official documents; and for purposes connected with the aforesaid matters. It seems peculiarly appropriate on a day when the House has been advised that two people are to be deported on the basis of, to them, unknown and unknowable information that such a Bill as mine should be brought before the House. The Bill seeks to fulfil two major purposes. In doing so, I should advise the House that it owes much to long-established practice in America and Sweden.

Its first major purpose is to open up the stores of public information held by Government Departments and to make them available to the public, with certain specified exceptions relating to, for example, military, security, police and other information. Its second purpose is to protect the individual citizen. In fact the largest clause—Clause 2—is devoted to the protection of the individual from the potential power which the State hold over him merely by its collection and storage of individual records.

Just today, for example, I was told by a former patient of the Central Middlesex Hospital that he had, quite by accident, come into possession of his hospital file. Access to such files is strictly forbidden to patients. To his horror this man discovered that in his file he was described as a homosexual and an atheist. That man is in fact a deeply religious and heterosexual man. Had he been allowed the right of access to those records as they were being compiled, or after they had been compiled, a travesty of justice such as this would not have occurred and this inaccurate and damaging information would never have been compiled. Such a record could not have been created if we had a fair and open system of record-keeping.

523 There can be few hon. Members who are not painfully aware that the processes of government in this country are too secret. This has much to do with growing public dissatisfaction with Governments of every political description. As Members we are only too aware of our great disadvantage in our dealings with the Executive. That disadvantage results from the disparity of information available to us, information which the Executive commands and releases only selectively and for its own purposes. Those purposes are not necessarily the purposes of this House, or the purposes, needs and demands of the British people.

Information is power. We are all aware of that. But we are talking about the power of the State over people. Executive secrecy is justifiable only in specific circumstances, in my opinion, and I think that this is probably the opinion of the majority of hon. Members. Executive secrecy is justifiable only in specific circumstances. Our traditon of government is the opposite—that all official information is secret and that the revelation of publicly held information is justifiable only in exceptional circumstances.

This seems to be the reverse of political common sense. It is contrary to the spirit of democracy, and the longer it persists, the greater is the risk that we aggrandise the power of the Executive at the expense of the democracy and so bring the State into disrepute in the minds of reasonable men and women.

Many proposals have been made in recent years to revitalise our democracy. Most hon. Members are aware that the body politic is not as well as it should be. We have had such measures as the Employment Protection Act, and a measure based on the Bullock proposals may shortly come before us. In the not- 524 too-distant past even the Conservative Government's Industrial Relations Act specifically referred, as did the Employment Protection Act and the Bullock proposals, to the disclosure of information by powerful organisations such as employers and Government Departments to individual citizens—recognising in doing so that this readjustment of the balance of power between the individual citizen and the State is vital and urgent.

Information is the staple diet of democracy. The exploitation of public ignorance is the key to the demagogue's success and is the enemy of democracy. If we do not meet the people's right to know, and do not do it soon, those who follow us will inherit a degenerated political system in which democracy is a faded and pathetic memory.