Mr. Ed Hammond:

That was many people's response. There was a small number of dissenting voices. The former Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, the senior pre-eminent civil servant in the country has cast some aspersions on the Freedom of Information Act. He made the point that I mentioned earlier about the chilling effects and the problems he thought it could have. Again, one could be charitable about that and say that looking at a government from the inside, as he does, he will see the shortcomings that perhaps freedom of information has in terms of speed in decision making and the fact that it can throw spanners in the works. Equally, one can could say that could be an example of somebody who is not signed up generally to the principles of transparency and does not really understand what transparency as a broader concept can bring to decision making, but instead looks at FOI purely as a procedural issue whereby people are sending in requests, those requests must be processed and it is additional work. It is FOI sitting in a separate box which will stop what one must do. One is not using the benefit and the lessons one learns through that process to influence one's wider work. One is treating it as an essentially transactional exercise.