“Things…. can only get blurrier…” - Part I

A 25-year retrospective on Tony Blair’s ‘Freedom of Information Act 2000’

By Checkpoint Charlie

You’re a politician and you have a policy idea. What are the most important things to do first? Set out the objectives clearly, define the specifics of how these will be achieved, then have the policy costed and ensure the improvements it will deliver are well-described and quantified?

Well, you might spend a few minutes on this but then you turn to the most important things: what to call it and how to communicate it.

Let’s go back to those early, heady, Blair years. We are three years in from the landslide victory and along comes the idea for a ‘Freedom of Information Act 2000’. What a wonderful name. This is something the public will take to instantly. People like the sound of ‘freedom’ and - as ‘information is power’ - it suggests they will immediately know more, which empowers them. Gone will be the days when the public felt they were kept in the dark about what is going on in government.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI Act) was initiated at the turn of the Millennium under Prime Minister Blair and came into force five years later, after some debate. Somewhat ironically the final version was severely restricted in its scope by the time it reached the statute book. In some ways its list of exemptions might make it more appropriately called the DOI Act: the Denial of Information Act, and we shall come on to that. Suffice to say it is allegedly the most exempted such Act in the World.

In any event it is in principle open to almost anyone to use and to ask almost any public body anything. Over 100,000 bodies in England, Wales and Northern Ireland may be questioned, from government departments to local schools, and these questions can come from everyone including private individuals, businesses, all manner of groups, and of course journalists. The Scots have their own version, naturally.

Watch out - I’m about to give you information freely

In the interests of transparency and in the spirit of this article’s subject matter, here I must declare an interest. I work freelance and research and write information on a daily basis, as well as working on contract for a major TV news organisation. (If you submit a Freedom of Information request I might even tell you which one.)

Unlike media organisations, my interests do not lie in reading the papers to see what others have written on a subject, then rehashing it into an apparently new piece of work in order to churn out six such stories per day. This is now the norm expected of young journalists working for many newspapers. They are then judged daily by the number of ‘page views’ their articles attract in the digital version of their paper, which of course leads to ‘click-bait’ headlines and profoundly disappointing content.

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Don't leave this to someone else. You are that 'someone else'.

Do you remember something they used to call ‘investigative journalism’?

Call me ‘old school’ but I prefer the Woodward and Bernstein style of investigative reporting. To put this into the British perspective many readers will recall the days when the Sunday Times had its ‘Insight Team’, started by the legendary Editor Harold Evans. These were the days when good journalists were given weeks to delve into stories no-one else had time to question and even less time to pursue. And some of the successes were spectacular. Aside from the obvious Watergate exposé in the Washington Post in the States, in the UK the Thalidomide scandal comes to mind.

For the most part, those days have long gone. Many journalists these days are content to reproduce press releases (mostly written by former journos) from government departments or public bodies, to embellish them with quotes from politicians, and then to present these as news reports.

These young (they are mostly under 30) journos also know what the priorities are. Immigration sells. The Royal Family – no matter how trivial the item – sells big-time. Disaster sells, particularly if there’s a death toll which can be updated regularly each day. Then there’s the ‘Topic of the Moment’, which will consume 80% of all output for anything from 12 hours to several days, as if all other news had simply ceased. It is the latter that explains why whichever is your favourite TV news channel turned us all into Catholics for several days when the last Pope passed away.

Where reality intrudes on a worthy idea

Turning back to the FOI Act, this should be a godsend to me and to those like me. A statutory obligation on those in Whitehall and elsewhere to answer our questions truthfully? On any given story, all our dreams should be fulfilled by the openness this espouses and engenders and, failing that, we should get it in one fell FOI request.

If this were true I would not be writing this and I suggest you would probably have stopped reading several paragraphs ago. Putting to one side the hugely-increased availability of news via so many outlets, do you feel you know more today about what government is really doing than you did 25 years ago? If your answer is in the negative then it must be asked what the FOI Act was all about and why it hasn’t delivered.

In Part II I will give you the inside track on how the FOI Act works in practice. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.) You will learn exactly how the process fails to deliver and even hear a specific example. Then I will consider the implications, whether this matters, and how it is indicative of the ways in which our society has been changing for the worse.

- By Checkpoint Charlie, Dec 2025