The price of freedom


The Freedom of Information Act aims to make society more open and transparent but what happens when it’s used to impede research? Freedom sometimes comes at a price, as Gerard Hastings, Anne Marie MacKintosh and Linda Bauld explain


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NFORMATION IS THE lifeblood of democracy. Little citizens can only keep an eye on big Government if they know what their leaders are doing, and truth can only be


spoken to power when the actions of the powerful are revealed. Secrecy and opacity, by contrast, can facilitate oppression. There is no doubt, then, that Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation is a vital part of any democracy. However, like all freedoms, it comes at a price – as our recent experience of dealing with FOI requests from a tobacco manufacturer, Philip Morris International (PMI), has underlined. Profound dilemmas emerged: the right to know has to be balanced with the right to confidentiality; the jurisprudence of transparency with that of research ethics; and academic accountability with the protection of children. Each of these demands a treatise in its own right; but space is limited and we want to bring something new to this debate: a novelty born of raw and uncomfortable experience.


14 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2011


The most prosaic price attached to FOI is the demand that it puts on the target of the information request – in this case a small team of academic researchers. In 2009 we received a letter from Clifford Chance, one of the top ten global law firms headquartered in London, asking for a vast array of information from one of our studies – including ‘all primary data’, ‘all questionnaires’, ‘all interviewers’ handbooks and/or instructions’, ‘all data files’, ‘all record descriptions’ and ‘all information relating to sampling, data collection, handling of non-response and post-stratification weighting and analysis’. The letter framed this as a request but reminded us that ‘under the Act’ we were ‘obliged to respond to this request within 20 working days’ – a stress-inducing compulsion that seemed completely at odds with the commonsense meaning of the word ‘request’. There ensued a series of anxious meetings with senior officers and the university lawyers,


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