Alan Roden

THERE is a list of shame which names the countries which chose to curtail people’s right to information at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Global Right to Information Rating tracker singles out Colombia, El Salvador and Bolsonaro’s Brazil, among others.

It also includes an entry for United Kingdom (Scotland) after Holyrood used emergency powers to extend the deadline for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

The Scottish Government was later forced by opposition parties to withdraw the changes, but the inclusion on this unenviable list remains for posterity – now with an added postscript.

Transparency has not been the watchword of the devolution era.

In 2017, journalists from across Scotland's media felt compelled to sign an open letter raising concerns about the way the Scottish Government was handling FOI requests.

A year later, Information Commissioner Daren Fitzhenry found "unjustifiable, significant delays" in a number of cases.

And the past week has seen attempts to restrict the public’s right to know reach new levels.

The claim made during Alex Salmond’s trial that female civil servants were allegedly told not to be left alone with him during his time as First Minister deserves to be questioned.

Nicola Sturgeon this week said she was unaware of any such advice about Mr Salmond, who was acquitted of 13 allegations of sexual assault.

But it is the head of the civil service, Leslie Evans, who this question should primarily be aimed at – and that is what MSP Murdo Fraser sought to do during a committee evidence session this week.

His approach was disallowed by convener, SNP MSP Linda Fabiani, which does little to create confidence that this inquiry will provide the transparency that was promised.

And when it comes to the national Covid-19 response, the public in Scotland has too often been left in the dark.

Much has been said and written about the Nike conference outbreak in Edinburgh in February, which didn’t come to light until after a BBC investigation, sparking claims of a cover-up.

But perhaps the biggest scandal of recent months – in all parts of the UK – is the decision to discharge patients from hospital into care homes, often without testing them.

The intention to free up hospital space was surely well-meaning, however the public deserves to know more about the data and the decision-making process behind it – information which has been incredibly hard to extract.

Last week a Sunday newspaper investigation even revealed that some patients were moved to care homes despite testing positive for Covid-19, leading to tetchy exchanges at First Minister’s Questions.

The chamber debate prompted an admission that governments make mistakes, but it didn’t produce more detail for the public.

The overall number of transfers with a positive test is likely to be significantly higher as some of the data remains under wraps.

It will no doubt take years before a full examination of Scotland’s response to the pandemic is available following the inevitable public inquiry.

One inquiry already underway is looking at the scandal of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, where contaminated water has been linked to a child’s death.

The public deserves transparency about what went wrong, but more importantly the family of Milly Main, the 10-year-old who died after contracting an infection there, deserve it.

Is it really fair that this process could take up to three years? If the health board had been more transparent from the start, the inquiry might not have been required.

But the lack of transparency in Scottish public life is far from unique.

Boris Johnson’s Westminster Government failed to release much of the scientific advice it received that led to key decisions at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Sir Paul Nurse, the director of the Francis Crick Institute in London and one of the country’s most eminent scientists, said decisions throughout the pandemic appear to have been made in a ‘black box’.

Initially, the UK Government even refused to release the names of those on its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).

At the start of the pandemic, the United Nations stated "this is a time when, more than ever, governments need to be open and transparent, responsive and accountable to the people they are seeking to protect".

Yet there remains a disappointing culture in British politics to fear transparency.

This perhaps stems from the old rules of politics which state that governments will be punished by voters for getting things wrong, so they attempt to hide their mistakes.

But in our new tribal politics, both the SNP and the Tories can defy conventional political gravity.

The debacle over this year’s school grades, both in Scotland and England, certainly hasn’t dented the SNP’s support – and while the Tories’ approval ratings have dipped, they still remain ahead of Labour.

U-turns following mistakes are therefore perhaps less feared by today’s governments, which should in theory be good for public policy.

But such policy reversals must go hand-in-hand with transparency. The public has a right to know, for example, how it came about that such a blunt algorithm was used by education authorities across the UK in this year’s grading, and why it was approved.

Greater transparency leads directly to greater trust. This should matter more to political parties than the risk of an embarrassing headline.

It’s no revelation that trust in politics and its institutions is low, and this is exacerbated in times of crisis, such as the current pandemic. But the more trust there is in government, the more it leads to compliance with health policies.

There is widespread frustration in government about those who are ignoring the advice on large gatherings, yet the link between transparency, trust and compliance is often overlooked.

Trust is also lower among women, individuals on low incomes, and young people. These three groups are the very groups which will be most exposed to the economic fallout from Covid-19 in the months and years ahead. How governments respond will affect their lives more than others, so the level of trust in them matters.

Both the current UK and Scottish governments are unlikely to change political hue any time soon. As the job losses rise, and public services become stretched, they both have work to do to build trust in a very different policy landscape.

That starts with being more open and transparent with the public.

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