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From private emails to Post-it Notes: How politicians avoid scrutiny
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The news that Matt Hancock routinely used a private email address while in office has prompted a flurry of questions. Labour has called for an investigation, accusing the now departed health secretary of attempting to “conduct official government business in secret”.

The revelation that the former health secretary did not even have a departmental email address has been followed by news of other Conservative ministers using private email. So why would politicians use only their personal email account? Well, the main reason is probably to avoid Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation.

FOI can be a powerful weapon, and one that is often hard to resist. However, this doesn’t stop politicians and governments from trying their best to stop it revealing things. While government-wide, systematic resistance is rare, there are examples of it, often at very high levels.

There are numerous strategies that politicians can use to avoid public scrutiny, which we can roughly separate out into ‘hide’, ‘fight’ and ‘undermine’.

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Hiding

One common response is to see if you can, in some way, hide from FOI laws. Laws are often extensive, but they don’t cover everything, and there are often grey areas you can duck into.

A famously opaque area is around meetings. Do FOI laws make for non-minuted, informal modes of decision-making, as officials turn to phone calls and disposable Post-it Notes? The Swedish government, which has the world’s oldest openness law, claims it does and calls this the ‘empty archives’ phenomenon, though it’s now better known as the ‘chilling effect’. Mentions of ‘Post-it Note’ approaches date back to the US in the 1960s and Australia in the 1980s. More recently, was a group of officials in Washington who were tasked with taping President Trump’s shredded documents back together.

In the UK, investigative journalism cooperative The Ferret unearthed evidence that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency asked for ‘verbal’ updates instead of written documents, mentioning FOI as a reason (see the emails here on page 11-12). This chain from 2008 shows a UK official apparently urging others to delete emails because of FOI. The RHI Inquiry in Northern Ireland also revealed a failure to record meetings, and the head of Northern Ireland’s Civil Service, David Sterling, admitted that the practice of taking minutes had “lapsed” after devolution and mentioned FOI specifically as a factor. The Inquiry opened up the almost existential question of when is a meeting a meeting, and when is it a ‘word in the corridor’?

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/freedom-of-information/private-emails-post-it-notes-how-politicians-avoid-scrutiny/