In my first Editorial (January 2005) I greeted the coming into force of the Freedom of Information Act, which promised the dawning of a new era of Government openness. I promised that SCPNET would keep a watching brief upon developments in the promised new era of transparency, and sought readers' experiences of the FOIA in action?

Have any medical members of the Society, or other visitors to its website, had occasion to seek disclosure of information from the Department of Health or any other government department?

I have to report now that the FOI Act is clearly failing to fulfil its declared aspirations, and seems to be a route not worth pursuing.

The Times obtained a copy of the Commissioner's caseload from June this year, listing more than 900 appeals, the vast majority of which are unopened or unresolved. Since then a further 700 appeal cases had been lodged but only 430 cases have been resolved - with just two of those, yes two, leading to the release of blocked information! Heather Brooke, author of Your Right to Know, expressed concern that the few cases the commissioner had completed were having no impact at all on Whitehall's culture of secrecy. She was a shortlisted runner up for the first Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism, won last night by the Daily Mail/BBC reporter John Sweeney for his four-year investigation into "shaken baby syndrome", which exposed the consultant paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow and led to the freeing of wrongfully imprisoned bereaved mothers.

Times journalist Sean O'Neill (Freedom to interfere? October 03 2005) has ascertained that the 33 caseworkers handling appeals against refusals to disclose documents (junior civil servants many of whom earn less than £20,000 p.a.) face a backlog of more than 1,200 cases, which at the current workrate may take eight years to clear. The Department of Constitutional Affairs, which is supposed to promote Open Government, had been the subject of 17 complaints. Apparently Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has no plans yet to seek extra resources to tackle the mounting workload at his Cheshire offices.

P G Woolf

SCPNET editorials do not necessarily represent the views of the Society unless so stated.