Heather Brooke

The MP's scandal has enough momentum to still be current when Britain goes to the pols to elect MEP's on Thursday. That it still has legs owes much to the piecemeal way in which the telegraph has used the information it has. They're not doing it methodically out of probity. It's because they spent money on it and want to recoup the maxium return on their investment one day at a time. I have far more sympathy with Heather Brooke who chose to go about getting this information using the proper means.

When the FOI came out, we all should have seen it for what it was - a fillip. Some information the government never has any intention of providing, no matter how politely you ask or how valid your reasoning. One of Heather's commentors included the following from the Beeb website (can't find the original):

“A cynic would say that the reason they were not too worried about Parliamentary information falling within the Act’s sway was that they were pretty confident that they could keep the most sensitive and damaging material from being released, whatever the legislation. They were probably right, generally speaking. The fact that they were short-sighted about the danger of expense claims being made public is more an indication of how complacent they had become about the system than their ability to calculate risk.

It is blindingly obvious that a UK government will always be able to keep the worst of its secrets, so the FoI Act was never going to be a great leveller. While I welcome its principles, I still think it is a very bad piece of legislation and when taken in conjunction with the Data Protection Act and similar legislation, it is a nightmare for public sector bodies to work within and a gravy train for lawyers.

As a person who once had to respond to FoI requests - many of them ridiculous pursuits of non-existent information by obsessives or blatent attempts by commercial organisations to harvest sales and marketing information - I have to admit to feeling somewhat pleased that the legislators are having a taste of their own medicine.”

Interesting point. Legislation to some factions is bad per se. Whereas in reality bad legislation is doing damage to the principle that some things require legislating. Some distinction needs to be made. We have a crecession that could have been avoided with proper legislative control of the banking sector. And the banking sector itself is able to argue still that legislation would stifle innovation and economic development in the teeth of foreclosures and redundancies. The poverty of some legislation seems almost wilfull, as if the ability to make laws is some how compromised. Now we know; lawmakers themselves do not have a unalloyed approach to their business. Not only are the compromised by lobbyists and compromised by the despearate need to maintain an image of themselves in the popular press and compromised by the whip of party politics and compromised by the careerist pursuit of the right side of a fence; they are now exposed as fatally compromised in their personal probity. You can shrug off the other things as "politics" because they are all circumstantial in comparison. And the point was made ably by Ian Hislop: Think about what other things MP's decide to spend tax payers money on.

I do have one slight caveat where the lovely Heather is concerned. Journalists who request information who are on fishing expeditions are really helping their own careers, win or lose the information they're after. They're not prioritising in the way that the public needs. I must admit that the scatter gun record of Ms Brookes requests on her website suggest either she selects her targets randomly in order to illustrate that evasiveness is endemic in public bodies, and to fortify her reputation as a slogger through all the knock backs she is inevitably going to get, or else she has some pattern relating to personal interest (although I can't piece together what that might be). Her requests for fire inspection reports from the LFEPA in 2005 seems totally random to me. Anyone who has conducted the brigade through fire inspections can be pretty sure there is very little dirt to dig. Either the brigade fail to inspect properly (and it would take a second inspection of the same building by another expert to verify, and on a different day through different eyes there will always be a different verdict - 10 building surveyors won't agree; either way it's not a job for a hack however clever she is), or there was a proper inspection, a building is in dire need of improvement to avoid very obvious fire hazards, in which case the landlord must be taken to task. But that is the job of the fire brigade. If they fail in that duty, and they very rarely ever do, their own colleagues will have to risk their lives putting out a fire. Fire Brigade inspections are carried out by brigade officers who have previously served on machines, fought fires and lost colleagues. There is literally nothing the fire brigade like less than risking their own men, despite what you might think. They really do take their duties very seriously indeed, have the powers available to prosecute and are always anxious do so where the risk is great, and have been freed up by the Reform Order to get on with inspecting genuinely risky properties and leaving low risk office buildings to the landlords. They don't believe the inspection reports meet the requirements of the FOI but they don't have anything to hide. It's not evasiveness for the sake of it. It's that they have a job to do. Exposing the rather prosaic proceedings of systematic checks that reveal some fire doors in M&S have closing forces below 30N is hardly shaking the foundations of the country. No one wants less fires thatn the fire brigade and no one works harder to reduce the number of them. How can you reproach them for not creating golden opporuntities to undermine their work, even were Ms Brooke the proud possessor of a Masters in Fire Engineering from Strathclyde. What Ms Brooke should investigate is the record of the CPS in bringing prosecutions where the fire brigade request them. 

Nevertheless, Ms Brooke does deserve the plaudits she is now getting for her persistence. I just wonder if the Torygraph hacks hadn't done a deal with brown envelopes in a darkebned multistorey whether her investigations into expenses would have been as fruitless as some of her other investigations have been. I guess the really great skill as an investigative journalists is the correctness of one's instinct that one is realy on to something. No one likes being asked questions. Ask anyone who has been cornered by revenue protection officers on a London bus and asked to show their oyster card to a portable reader.