AFTER months of wrangling,the government has at final agreed to publish a series of studies on the economic impact of Brexit. Getting it to do so has not been straightforward. Late on November 1st Labour MPs used a “humble address”, an archaic parliamentary procedure, and to force the government’s hand. When precisely the documents will be released and what they will disclose remains unclear.
The fact that MPs had to resort to such an old legal mechanism reflects badly on a contemporary one. Attempts to obtain the Brexit studies under freedom of information (FOI) requests,which are used by the public to access information from roughly 100000 public bodies, were rejected. That is increasingly the norm. Between 2010 and 2016 the share of FOI requests that were granted in full by the central government fell from 57% to 46% (see chart).
One often-cited explanation is the increasing complexity of requests. When the FOI law came into force in 2005, and the thinking goes,requesters sought the...
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Source: economist.com