Inside Track Interview
Dunion at FoE in 1996 and right at Edinburgh University in 1982
didn’t think the Scottish press would run league tables of the worst surgeons in Scotland and I certainly thought the public would understand that emergency surgery on a high risk patient would probably not have the same outcome compared with an elective procedure on someone who was booked in on a Tursday afternoon and due to come back out later that day. But the precursor to all of that had been the scandals we had seen down south, particularly at Bristol Royal Infirmary where it was clear that a large number of children had died unnecessarily because of poor monitoring of the performance of surgeons, compounded of course by the fact that the children’s organs were withheld without knowledge of their parents. Professor Ian Kennedy was very forceful in his conclusions in that inquiry and that bore heavily on my decision; that there was evidence of an old boys’ network that would rather maintain that network than give the public evidence of any failings on their part and that the public authorities failed to recognise that the number of deaths were too high and failed to step in soon enough and within the context of all of that, I felt the public were saying this is what we need to know now.” Dunion officially leaves his post on 23
February when he will be in court, defending his decision for South Lanarkshire Council to release information on pay scales. Te new commissioner will take his place in court the following day.
Te case is one of a dramatically increased number of appeals – the highest since the legislation was introduced – falling on Dunion’s desk. He suspects this is an indication of a more adversarial relationship between requestors and public bodies, perhaps rooted in the current financial crisis and people now asking
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www.holyrood.com 12 December 2011
difficult questions about policy making and the bearing that has on spending which may be uncomfortable for the authority to answer. He says this needs to be addressed quickly and he also has concerns that Scotland’s gold-plated reputation in FOI is slipping back. “Tere are 90 countries worldwide and 260 states and provinces with some form of FOI and the driving force is it provides for good governance, tackles corruption and gets citizens involved in decision making and however much individual ministers or politicians or councillors, etc just wish this act would go away or this commissioner would go away, I just don’t see it happening because it is completely contrary to the flow of history but we need to get away from an accommodation of FOI to a proper embracing of it. “I would repeat Jim Wallace’s view of the culture of secrecy and say we now have a culture of compliance and in some respects, a slight slip back and an irritated culture of compliance and so bodies will use the legislation if they possibly can to frustrate the requests. I think we need to push beyond that and have professionalism and an audit trail and we need to stop the haemorrhaging of rights which is happening with these arm’s length organisations. One of my big disappointments as I leave office is not to get these additional bodies designated and my fear is that that is because FOI is seen as a burden and having arm’s length organisations gives public bodies a chance to not have that additional burden. Tat is a real concern for me. I don’t understand the rationale that the Government applied to not extending the designation last year.”
I wonder now, having been in on the inside of political decision making, does he leave the commissioner’s office understanding
politicians any better than he did when he was lobbying them for change as an environmental campaigner? “What I see are two things: the straightforward professional and I see people doing a good job and bringing expertise to very difficult and sometimes obscure issues. Te much more difficult area for me is the politics of decision making because I am not a politician and I have to put myself in the position of thinking, ‘can this do me or my party damage’ weighed against, ‘is it in the best interests of the public’ and that is a very hard judgement to make and it is where we tend to rub up against [each] other because the degree of harm, from my point of view, is very different from theirs. “It’s given me a very considerable insight into politics that you can’t get from outside or indeed inside unless you are in a ministerial office. Te challenges that they face are the dual challenge of running the country and maintaining the country’s confidence as demonstrated through the ballot box. “However, it drives me demented, though, that people in public places destroy their careers because they had crossed a line and they must have known they were sailing close to the wind so why did they do it? On that, I am afraid, I am no nearer to understanding.” Has he enjoyed having the power of
knowledge? “I don’t regard it as power,” he laughs. “I can’t do anything with it because I either disclose it and everyone has it or I don’t disclose it and I then seal it off and don’t discuss it and will never disclose it so it just sits in here,” he says tapping his head.
Holyrood magazine’s 9th FOI conference will be held on 16 December
http://foi.holyrood.com/
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