The Freedom of Information Act has significantly impacted on the culture of the Civil Service which is to the service's credit. It is appropriate that those of us on the Opposition side of the House acknowledge that. When I was the Labour Party spokesperson in the other House I went to the Department of Finance shortly after the introduction of the Act in 1997 with a specific query about corporation tax. I submitted a catch-all request looking for any records held by the Department in relation to corporation tax. A very senior civil servant invited me to meet him to talk about my request. He told me that there were two ways of dealing with my request: he could ask half a dozen executive officers to make a list of the records dealing with corporation tax which could take three or four days to complete; or I could tell him what I wanted to know and he would endeavour to answer the question. I informed him that I wanted to know whether the then Government – as it had promised to do in the manifesto it presented to the people – had done anything to reduce corporation tax to 10%. He said, "No" and that was the end of the conversation.