Your Right To Know

Public services should be for the many not the few
The Big Issue, September 2008
By Heather Brooke

In for a penny in for a pound or at least 50 pence. That’s how much you’ll pay to visit the so-called public toilets around Parliament.

Local councils say the reason for leasing out the loos to private companies is purely economic. In a Westminster cabinet member report, officials say that the £2.7 million the council spends on public toilets is “a high level of expenditure for an entirely discretionary service.”

What? Pissing is discretionary? Tell that to your bladder the next time you get a call from nature. I suppose they mean peeing in public. We could go home or buy something in Starbucks or a pub and use their toilet. But should we have to? And what about those who have nowhere to go or the money for a purchase? And really, what else are taxes for but to provide common public services for which there is no commercial incentive?

Surely it’s basic human dignity (and hygiene) to have access to a clean toilet. Yet the number of public loos has diminished by 50 per cent according to Mike Bone, Director of the British Toilet Association, a finding backed up by other government investigations. London has seen the worst decline with just 400 public toilets left in a city with nearly 7.5 million people. That’s one for nearly 18,000 Londoners. Quite a queue!

It gets worse. There are 28 million visitors to London, of whom 12 million are from overseas and there is just one public toilet for every 67,000. That’s even before we consider the 2012 Olympics. Public transport is no better: of data supplied by 255 Tube stations, only 88 (35 per cent) have public toilet provision.

Beijing spent $48million (£27million) to provide 4,700 public toilets for the 2008 Games, one for every 500 metres. In addition all restaurants, shops and hotels have to offer their toilets for the use of non-customers for free.

I’m a healthy young woman and I find the lack of public loos in London extremely inconvenient so how much worse it must be for older people, pregnant women, parents with young children and those with urinary health issues. These people suffer while the young men who piss publicly on the street are given extra street urinals. Will it take a cadre of women urinating in public before we are given adequate resources?

When I think of all the nonsense my taxes pay for such as social engineering projects, public relations (which is little more than political propaganda) and top officials’ salaries, I am livid. According to the Town Hall Rich List (http://tinyurl.com/3xnw6v), 818 council managers earned more than £100,000 in 2006-07, up from 645 the previous year and in 2007 Tower Hamlets, England’s most deprived borough, paid 27 staffers more than £100,000!
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A recent Freedom of Information request revealed the BBC spent more than £80,000 entertaining guests at Wimbledon 2008. According to The Telegraph the Beeb splurged £53,528 on a “marquee and associated costs” and £18,281 on hospitality, including food and drink. In addition, a total of £9,645 was spent on items such as match tickets, car parking, programmes and invitations.

At this time of year, many sixth-formers across the country are thinking about where to apply to university and their decision may be informed by figures released under the FOIA.

An article recently published in the The Times (University had 65 cheats and 801 plagiarists says:

“Cheating at London Metropolitan University is worse than at any other of 73 universities giving information on the problem.

Sixty-five students there were caught cheating in formal exams in the 2006-7 academic year and it had a record 801 plagiarists, according to figures issued under the Freedom of Information Act.

Westminster was next worst, with 39 exam cheats. South Bank University, also in London, came third with 35 for offences including talking in a foreign language before the end of an exam.”

A new report by the Campaign for Freedom of Information (CFOI) highlights the contribution that the Fredom of Information Act has made to good journalism. It says that 2006 and 2007 together saw over 1,000 FOI-generated articles published by the media, noting in particular the wide range of information released.

The CFOI press release about the report is here:

http://www.cfoi.org.uk/foi300908pr.html

The full 250 page report, which summarises all the 06-07 stories, is available at:

www.cfoi.org.uk/pdf/FOIStories2006-07.pdf

And you can read a news write-up about the report’s publication in the Press Gazette.

Freedom of information not only enables scrutiny by the citizen, it also helps political figures keep an eye on one another. A couple of recent examples:

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, recently used FOI requests to show that the government has not met its pledge to stop accommodating children on adult psychiatric wards. The Guardian covered this story if you want to read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/sep/26/mentalhealth.youngpeople

City Councillor, Martin Mullaney, found that the wages of Trade Union officials at Birmingham City Council are costing council tax-payers over £1 million a year. He described the figures as “alarming”. You can read about it in the Birmingham Post. The costs, revealed through FOI, reveal bills of £1.4 million that are met by council tax payers. But with hidden costs added, including the value of office accommodation, phone calls and stationery, the total is likely to be far higher.

One way to access official information is to send a carefully worded freedom of information request. Another is to read a classified dossier on a commuter train, buy a stolen NHS computer or explore a government disc that might reach you by post any day now. More and more FOI requests are exposing the extent of data breaches in public bodies that handle sensitive information.

A Daily Telegraph article about the topless nurse who posed for pictures on hospital wards, says: “Figures obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from 162 PCTs, hospital trusts and NHS authorities showed that there had been 557 incidents of lost data and 794 breaches of confidentiality since January 2007.”

The Lincolnshire Echo tells a similar story about NHS data breaches: “In total, nine data breaches were recorded by Lincolnshire health services between January 2007 and August this year, according to information released to health journal Pulse under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Also through FOI, the Oxford Mail discoverd that three laptops were stolen from Thames Valley Police Staff between August 2006 and August 2008. Perhaps even more significantly:

“Police would not release statistics about police mobile phones or computer disks lost or stolen.”

So the true loss is likely much greater.

Tonga is set to be the next country to enact a freedom of information law. The bill was discussed at a recent workshop held in the South Pacific Island called ‘Parliament and the Media’.

Tongan Attorney General Ms Alisi Taumoepeau, one of the most prominent supporters of the bill expects it to be introduced later next year.

Steven Johnson has finished his post as FOI officer at the Food Standards Agency.

He has been replaced by:

Rosalie Ashtani
0207 7276 8632
rosalie.ashtani@foodstandardsagency.gsi.gov.uk

When I worked as a crime reporter in South Carolina, I was used to reading through ALL police incident reports. Some information was redacted (such as witness names in sensitive investigations) but not much. The default was always on openness as it was the public who paid for the police and in whose name they worked.

South Carolina is not renowned as a progressive state but residents could at least claim they were more enlightened than the residents of Mississippi - a real backwater! I read in the papers that the Mississippi Legislature earlier this year approved changes in the state’s Open Records Law to provide citizens with more access to crime reports. The idea is that citizens not only should have access to their government, but that opening law enforcement incident reports is a matter of public safety as well as being a crime-fighting tool.

Try telling that to ANY police force in the UK where all criminal incidents reports are strictly off limits to the public.

I have not always been as diligent as I would like with this blog or answering readers’ queries and correspondence. Apologies for that, but it’s been difficult doing all this on my own plus trying to run some sort of viable career. But all that is changing.

YRTK now has two new people working to help expand the public’s right to know. A big welcome to Alex Wood and Matthew Bardo. They will be contributing to this blog and helping me with my campaigns. In addition, YRTK may soon have its own permanent office location - other than my study - so stay tuned!