Parliamentary Questions used to be one of the prime ways MPs could hold a government to account, keep Ministers on their toes, expose problems and probe mistakes. Labour used to be quite good at them in Opposition. Once in government they decided on their slow strangulation, to prevent the Opposition using them in the way they did.
PQs worked for several reasons. MPs had privileged access to information through them. On behalf of the public they could find out things that others were unable to. The assumption was that if the government knew the answer it had to supply it to an MP unless it compromised national security, commercial confidentiality or was a sensitive matter about an individual. The answer was published in Hansard. The press and media regularly read Hansard answers, often finding good stories from the MPs’ detective work.
The Freedom of Information legislation effectively removed the privileged access for PQs. Anyone can now ask a good question of the government, and have an equal ticket in the lottery for an answer. All will encounter delay and reluctance to part with information, especially MPs with a reputation for asking good or embarrassing questions. A member of the public may draw a better lottery ticket than an MP when trying to get to the bottom of an issue. It may suit the government to let them know rather than the MP, as their answer does not have to be published in Hansard and they may less access to the media than an MP.
Some time ago I highlighted here the large sum of money we gave via the Financial Compensation scheme to Santander to take the retail deposits of Bradford and Bignley. No-one would run this story in the media, as the spin had told them something different.
Recently I revisited this issue, and asked the Treasury
“Whether any public money was provided to Santander in respect of Bradford and Bingley’s deposit liabilities” .
The answer admitted they did make payments, but as always it refused to give away the crucial details:
” Details of the financial support provided to banks in 2008-9, including the amounts involved in the transfer of Bradford and Bignley’s retail deposits to Abbey, are set out in the Treasury’s Resource Accounts for 2008-9″
Notice they not only decline to provide the true answer on the Hansard record, for fear no doubt of it being reported, but they also change Santander to Abbey, presumably because Abbey is a British bank. They do not wish to acknowledge that we financed a very handy large cash injection to a large Spanish banking group at the same time as nationalising a couple of our other banks.
I asked about the highly charged issue of bonuses to bankers in banks subsidised by taxpayers. I asked particularly “How much has been allocated for the payment of bonuses to staff by banks and financial institutions in receipt of public money in a) 2008-9 and b) 2009-10?”
You would have thought they both knew and could answer at least with respect to the year completed six months ago. Instead I was told
“The banks in which the government is a shareholder are managed on an arms length commercial basis by the UKFI…..(followed by guff about eventual publication of details)”
Once again the government had absolutely no intention of answering a straightforward question of great public interest about an issue they are currently proposing to legislate on!
There was a similar refusal to give any figures in a question about the true level of the public sector debt, a refusal to provide any information about the bad debt figures for RBS and the due diligence findings, and a refusal to provide a timetable for the sale of Northern Rock which has been trailed in the media.
I asked why the government plans to buy more shares in Lloyds. This was the pathetic non answer:
“As a shareholder, the government has the option to take up part of the newly issued equity. (of course – it is a rights issue). If we did not do so, the value of the existing taxpayer shareholding would be diminished (if they did not do so their rights would be sold in nil paid form to someone else, and the taxpayer would receive a payment). To protect the value of our shares, we have therefore decided to take up our share of this new capital investing £5.7billion net of underwriting fee” (In other words hasn’t a clue why they are buying more shares)
They have killed the written Parliamentary Question.