FOI requests applying to development agencies?

Gordon Brown recently harped on about liberty as a traditional British trait in a rather blatant and awkward attempt to divert attention from the fact he is a supporter of anti-libertarian terrorist laws and that he is Scottish in an age of rising English nationalism.

One of his ideas was to extend Freedom of Information legislation, which is widely agreed to have been a success since it was passed in 2000. The law gives journalists and members of the public the power to demand information from public bodies, providing that the cost of retrieving it is not too high.

Now Brown wants to extend Freedom of Information so that it covers:

• Organisations which appear to the Secretary of State to exercise functions of a public nature.
• Organisations which are providing, under a contract made with a public authority, any service whose provision is a function of that authority.

The consultation document doesn't give any more detail about the type of organisations which would be covered by this second point. But presumably development agencies funded by DfID, especially those under the given cash under the Partnership Programme Agreements funding stream, would be covered.

New kid on the block

Douglas Alexander, the new Secretary of State for International Development, has written in DfID's Developments magazine about his recent trip to Afghanistan:

I think we can do more to make sure the public understand what development is about and to take pride in the UK’s role in it. I wish I could have taken a group of tax payers to the school in Afghanistan that I visited last week, and introduced them to the headteacher who taught for many years under trees in the garden of that school, and then later under canvas but is now teaching in a fantastic school building. I wish people could have listened, as I did, to the schoolgirls there who had been denied an education under the Taliban, but now told me how they aspired to be doctors and engineers. I don’t think I’d have any difficulty convincing people that their money had been well spent, and that it was the right thing to do. It’s part of my responsibility to share those stories with the public.

But it is not good enough to strive to 'share stories' with the public - since, if politicians (and some development agencies) have their way, these will always be stories of success.

What's needed is a more determined effort to share the successes and failures of development interventions in a way that lets professionals learn from mistakes and the public keep spending in check.