Inside Track Interview
Tis person had the right under environmental regulations to ask for the information and that representative was misinforming people about their rights and it was all about holding onto power. “Knowledge is power. Exerting power and authority which says to people they should not be given information because they will misinterpret it is something I am frequently told and my answer is that you need to help them interpret something if it is difficult to understand, not just assume they are just too stupid to understand information. If you accept that then you allow the person in authority to simply say, ‘here is your nuclear power station’ or ‘here are your GMOs (genetically modified organisms)’ without any public engagement. We have a pretty bad track record of authorities doing things by themselves in isolation because it is done by the book but ignoring the possibility of concerns and refusing to engage with the public by standing behind the bureaucracy of decision making, is wrong. What they tend to forget is that the European directive is actually headed up ‘access to information and participation in environmental decision making’ and that the whole idea is to get the information to actively engage the citizen. Tis is about saying that after taking the decision we will be prepared to share but we don’t want to have that decision being adulterated by the public putting pressure on us. I think it is a bit timid if officials can’t face having lobbying or have people raising concerns simply because they are concerned about what they might say. “One of my great compulsions is to put
power in the hands of the people and one of the problems in Scotland is a kind of paternalism that says, leave it to us, to the experts and we will set up the regulatory bodies and the inspectorates and we will do the job for you because it is a bit too difficult or complicated for you to understand or they say, ‘leave it to us the politicians and we will hold people to account and act on your behalf’. Te whole point of FOI is to put power in the hands of the people so they ask the questions they want answered, without worrying about whether it will offend anybody and the most successful people I see using FOI now are still those campaigning grassroots bodies who are not even part of the organised voluntary sector but just set up to pursue one legitimate concern whether it is around hospital-acquired infections or rural schools. Tey are not part of a national body, they are just fearless and they pose the questions, get the answers and change policies and that is the success of FOI.” It’s interesting to hear Dunion speak like this because after eight years in the job and despite the trappings of office, the conventional suit and the fact that some thought it meant the poacher had turned gamekeeper, he is still pretty radical. He can still wave a metaphorical placard and he still is fired by a fundamental belief in the fact that those in power are accountable to the people that put them there. Why, I wonder, did
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www.holyrood.com 12 December 2011
he actually want the job? “It’s a job that I really keenly wanted to do for all of the reasons we have discussed and for all my background in campaigning. You can look around the world, and we are not by any means the first country to do this. Tere are lots of commissioners and go look at their websites and look at the cases they have dealt with and what you see is that when you come to the role of the commissioner, you are sitting in judgement of what’s in the public’s interest and that is not about just a legal decision, it is about a knowledge of your own country, a knowledge about the issues that matter to people and looking at issues of harm and bringing your own view to whether authorities are being a bit precious and simply expecting to continue business as usual and that the commissioner will endorse that. Tis job is about value judgements and weighing things in balance and I thought it was important to have a progressive commissioner. Jim Wallace, and others ahead of the legislation coming in, called for a cultural change and they were using very strong language, like we needed transparency. You don’t bring in culture change by going soft and introducing an act, appointing a commissioner and then giving everyone platitudes about bedding things in gradually, etc. I took a view that the Act would be enforced from day one. “Te reason I went for this job was because I had spent my whole life in the voluntary sector trying to get answers but also as director of FoE I had been actively lobbying for an FOI act and to make sure that all that we had got wrong with the environmental regulations; which is that they were not being used because people didn’t know anything about them, because local authorities were not trained up to recognise requests and because there was no one body to
I would just moan about the commissioner we got.” Dunion had been a thorn in the side of officialdom for some time – always asking questions, always pushing for answers – and had a proven track record of attempting to open government up. Friends of the Earth Scotland was the only charity at the time to appoint its own freedom of information officer and a survey for FoE Scotland showed nearly 10 per cent of requests for official information went unanswered, and more than 40 per cent of respondents found answers inadequate.
“It’s a pattern worldwide that politicians are in favour of FOI until they are in power”
enforce them, would not happen with FOI. “One of the great things about FOI was that
there was going to be a commissioner and so in my role at FoE, I would be speaking to Jim Wallace, who was justice minister at the time, and I would be asking, ‘what about this’, ‘what about that?’ and he said to me, ‘Kevin, you have to remember that there will be a commissioner to deal with all of this’ and I began to think that this commissioner person would be very important. I wasn’t thinking I could be it but I was thinking about who it could be. I remembered speaking to my wife about it and she said that if I felt so strongly about it then I had to put my hat in the ring because otherwise
I wonder if that is because many people in authority wish to protect their own professionalism and simply think the general public wouldn’t have the capability to understand the work they have done. Dunion dismisses
this with the contempt built up over years as a campaigner. “I credit the public with the intelligence to understand knowledge and if they don’t get it all then they can also be facilitated in that. Tink of the great impasses of the environmental movement – GMOs – and there were some of the scientists who believed that the language used by the environmentalists – hopefully, not by me – was scaremongering; Frankenstein foods and so on but equally, the scientists failed to engage with the public’s ‘what if’ scenarios. Te public were basically saying, ‘if we let you do this with no discussion, will you just go to the next stage which might be a lot less
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