Government told to publish Gateway reviews on ID cards
Bill Goodwin writes in Computer Weekly:
The government has been ordered to disclose confidential reports into the viability of its £5.8bn ID card programme.
In a precedent-setting case, the Information Tribunal has dismissed an appeal by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), ordering it to publish its Gateway reviews of the programme.
The tribunal ruled, in a 40-page decision published today, that the public interest in disclosing the reports – which assess the business case for ID cards – outweighed the public interest in keeping them secret.
The case will put pressure on the government to routinely make Gateway reviews into government IT projects available to the public.
“Disclosure is likely to enhance public debate of issues such as the programme’s feasibility and how it is managed,” the information commissioner Richard Thomas said today in response to the decision.
The tribunal’s decision is published here. The Gateway review itself will be published in at most two weeks, after a secondary issue about identifying individuals involved in the reviews has been resolved.
May 4th, 2007 at 07:56
I think it’s going to be more than two weeks!
The OGC has two weeks to request that names be removed from the document, and after the tribunal decides yes or no for this, the OGC will have another two weeks to do the actual publication. Assuming there’s no to-and-fro of pleading.
The Information Tribunal should prepare itself for a long complicated request that will take weeks to figure out. Add some strangely coincidental ‘publication difficulties’ at the OGC at the end of the second 14-day period, and before you know it either the summer recess will be upon us or a convenient day will be available on which the information can be published. Alternatively they might provide us with a good example of what open government should be about.
May 4th, 2007 at 15:49
What? This bunch of Nu Labour liars and cheats know nothing of open (and honest) government. Pigs will fly first!
May 5th, 2007 at 14:16
If the OGC wish to withhold the names of individuals from the disclosure, they should publish the review with all relevant names withheld, simultaneously with applying to withhold those names.
Any other action indicates alternative motivation, or (potentially) abuse of process.
If the alternative motivation is not with the bounds permitted by the latest IC tribunal ruling, or there is potentially abuse of process, that might well be grounds for a case of maladministration against senior OGC staff.
Best regards