SNP ministers have announced plans to improve their “transparency and openness” after they were caught operating a secret twin-track freedom of information regime.
Scotland’s information watchdog found evidence the Scottish Government was making it tougher for journalists, MSPs and political researchers to receive documents.
They were “expressly made subject to a different process for clearance than other requester groups”, the Scottish Information Commissioner said.
A new “action plan” drawn up by the Government outlines steps to improve the way it handles FoI requests, including enhanced staff training and a more streamlined clearance process.
Ministers said the proposals would build on the “current above-target performance of answering 93 per cent of requests on time so far this year”.
Parliamentary business minister Graeme Dey said: “This action plan builds on our improving performance in responding to FoIs and ensures we get requests on the right track from the outset and provide quality responses as promptly as possible.”
But Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP Tavish Scott said the question journalists and MSPs want answered is “whether our requests for information will be fairly dealt with in the future”.
He said: “The SNP do not like answering difficult questions so time and time again, MSPs have to resort to FoI as obfuscation is taken to new levels by our government. We then found that SNP political advisors, paid for by the taxpayer, were neutering these answers.
“All this must be swept away. That will be the acid test of whether this action plan works. Perhaps we should all begin by using FoI to discover what we can about the process leading up to the publication of the action plan.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel