Watchdog rebukes government for blocking Times FoI request
Internal correspondence showed staff at the Attorney General's Office (AGO), the government's legal advisory office, had intervened to 'maximise the delay' in having to disclose how often the former minister Suella Braverman had forwarded official correspondence to private email addresses.
After a lengthy legal battle, The Times was able to reveal last year that she had done so on 127 occasions, which a former head of the National Cyber Security Centre described as posing a 'clear vulnerability'.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it was 'highly concerning behaviour for an organisation with the AGO's role and remit to take this approach', adding that it must take action to ensure requests from journalists are not mishandled in future.
Braverman was later forced out as home secretary for using such private emails by Liz Truss, before being reappointed by Rishi Sunak.
The intervention came as the government was being widely criticised for its approach to transparency.
Last week it was revealed that the government had maintained a superinjunction to prevent disclosure of information about a leak of thousands of names of Afghans who were seeking to flee to the UK for two years, and the efforts to protect those affected, despite the clear public interest in scrutiny.
• Juliet Samuel: Afghan cover-up shows secrecy is addictive
The ICO said the correspondence about Braverman 'strongly implies that the AGO anticipated their refusal would be overturned and aimed to delay the publication of information that it believed it should release under The Freedom of Information Act'.
It said that it 'should not require the commissioner and then the tribunal to instruct them to disclose information which they know they should disclose', which was a 'waste of their own, the commissioner's, the tribunal's and ultimately the taxpayer's limited resources'.
The transparency watchdog further criticised the AGO for allowing senior officials to intervene to water down the response to ensure what was disclosed would not be 'easily quotable in a newspaper', with it being clear that 'the quality of the response the requester received was likely to be affected by their status as a journalist'.
It said it was also of concern, given the role of the AGO in supporting the government's compliance with the law, that staff also revealed the response was written with reference to concerns that 'HO Spads [Home Office special advisers]/No 10 may wish to spin this'.
The internal correspondence, the ICO said, raised concern about 'the underlying culture at the AGO in relation to transparency', concluding that it was 'clearly not in the spirit of the act that a request made at the end of 2022 for information that should have been released at the time does not result in disclosure of information until 2024.'
The AGO was approached for comment.
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