§ Lord BachMy honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Ivor Caplin) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
The first duty under the Freedom of Information Act to be implemented by government departments was the requirement to prepare publication schemes. The MoD's publication scheme is accessible via the Internet at www.foi.mod.uk. Since the scheme was published in November 2002, we have continued to look for opportunities to extend the commitment to make information available proactively. To date, a further five classes of information have been added to the original publication scheme and a process for identifying and adding more is in place. The new classes cover information provided by the Army Historical Branch, the Naval Historical Branch, Defence Analytical Services Agency (DASA) Corporate Documents, Defence Data Definitions, and Defence Statistics.
As a further step in this process, I am announcing today that a new class of information will be included to require publication of the consolidated results of corporate-level quantitative opinion surveys carried out to gauge the attitude of members of the public to the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces. The results of similar surveys undertaken internally with a random cross-section of the department's own staff will also be published. The results of the external 60WS corporate-level surveys undertaken since 1999 are also being placed in the Library of the House.
From October 2004, we also plan to release the results of the continuous attitude surveys which are undertaken by each of the three Services to measure the morale and understand the concerns of their personnel across a spectrum of issues. These surveys are sent out annually to a random sample of around 8,000 military personnel at all ranks. This commitment to publish the results of these surveys will also be reflected through a class of information in the MoD's publication scheme.