Am I smug? I’m mega-smug
The Daily Telegraph’s revelations on UK MPs’ expenses have been a shot in the arm for British democracy and for the press. They have sold millions of papers and restored popular confidence in journalism — an amazing reversal of the recent trend.
The story started not with the massive investment of a national paper — the Telegraph had a special team working in a secret bunker for two months — but the determination of a single-minded freelance.
Heather Brooke is an American reporter who came to Britain and was outraged by the official secrecy and obstruction of journalists’ enquiries here. She became a campaigner for freedom of information and in the process launched the investigation into MPs’ second home allowances.
She told TIM GOPSILL the story.
IT WAS at the NUJ’s annual conference in Belfast in April last year that Heather Brooke picked up the first trickle of the flood that was to inundate the British Parliamentary system just over a year later. As an investigative journalist from the USA working in London on a mission to introduce the American “freedom of information” culture into British journalism, she received the first information published on the allowances that MPs had claimed to cover the cost of their second homes.
As the Annual Delegate Meeting droned on in the ballroom of Belfast’s Europa Hotel — a significant place for journalists as the much-bombed home of reporters covering the 25-year civil war in Northern Ireland — Heather Brooke set up her laptop on a cocktail table in the bar to download the pages of facts and figures from the House of Commons.
It was not, of course, the full deal. The information covered only 14 MPs and it did not include their own written claims; it was just the figures. And it had not been Heather Brooke who requested this particular data, but the BBC, which with a couple of national papers had signed up for her crusade. But it was the first crack in the dam.
Back in the hall, she went to the rostrum as a delegate from the union’s London Freelance Branch to propose a motion. Couched in the unionese language in which such things are written, it began: “This ADM welcomes the U-turn by the British Government over its plans to introduce new charging proposals which would have watered down the Freedom of Information Act. ADM instructs the NEC to campaign to extend the scope and range of the Act ...”
This was another front of the freedom of information war — fighting off a particularly underhand move by the UK government to stifle the number of FoI applications by limiting the cost that could be incurred by public bodies in answering them. That battle had been won the year before. But it was only a skirmish and the biggest one was still raging on.
HEATHER BROOKE was a former small-town newspaper reporter who had become exasperated with the increasing corporate control of American journalism, given it up and come to England in 1997 to do a master’s degree in English literature. She thought she was through with journalism, and came back to it only in a roundabout way.
She and her husband were living in a former council flat in east London, on an estate that was plagued with youth crime. She wanted to find out what the council was doing about it. “I found that the attitude of the council was incredibly feudal,” she says. “They would not give me any information. Councils work for the public and the public should have access to it. They shove propaganda at you but the minute you ask a question they clam up.
“It’s the same everywhere in this country, they don’t want to give you any information that could challenge their authority. In the US I was trained to do journalism in a way that was heavily reliant on public records. I came to Britain and there are no public records to speak of. Your journalism is based on who you know, not what you know, and I didn’t know anybody. I tried to do journalism as in the US and found there were no records, which made me angry.
“That’s what got me into writing a book on freedom of information.” Your Right To Know, published in 2004, is widely used by journalists as a handbook. The same year Heather Brooke came to the NUJ with an offer to hold training courses into the use of the UK Freedom of Information Act, which was to come into force on January 1 2005.
The offer was quickly taken up. The union, which had campaigned for FoI for years, had been worried that when the Act came in there would be too few journalists with the initiative to take advantage of it. The culture of journalism, it was felt, might have moved too far under commercial pressures from investigative reporting towards cheap, ready made, officially provided or personality-based news.
The course has been a great success and is still going. Journalists who have taken it have won awards for bringing all kinds of questionable activities to light and have gathered notable scalps. They include David Gordon of the Belfast Telegraph whose enquiries into the business connections of Ian Paisley Jr led to his resignation as a Northern Ireland minister.
Despite the limitations in the categories of information that can be accessed, despite the patchy responses of public authorities and despite the delays in the appeals process that can drag cases on for years, FoI has been a thumping success for British journalism.
IN THE process of researching the book Heather Brooke approached the authorities at the House of Commons to find out what steps they had taken to prepare for FoI. “They hadn’t done anything,” she says, “so when the Act came in I started making requests. I made one on MPs’ expenses, one on their staff, then their travel, and then the second homes allowances.
“The Commons said they couldn’t do it so I appealed to the Information Commissioner. He said I should narrow it down. I asked the Commons how many they could manage and they said ‘ten’. I thought it was ridiculous but that’s all I could get so I picked ten top politicians — party leaders, ministers and so on. The Commons refused to comply so I appealed again to the commissioner.”
This was in 2006. By now journalists on the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and the BBC had made requests, over particular MPs they were interested in. “I emailed the others suggesting we should appeal together to the Information Tribunal,” says Heather Brooke, “so it would show we were all in it for the public interest, not for our own scoops.” This brought Ben Leapman of the Sunday Telegraph and Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas of the Sunday Times into the action, and the number of MPs they were pursuing to 14: Heather Brooke’s ten and one each for the others.
It took the commissioner more than a year to rule that, yes, MPs’ claims for allowances should be released, but not their documentation. The BBC accepted the ruling and the Commons supplied that limited information; this is what Heather Brooke downloaded at the NUJ conference. The others decided to go for broke and appealed to the Information Tribunal, where in February 2008 they won the day.
The Commons were not going to give in without a fight. “They have been relentlessly obstructive throughout the proceedings,” says Heather Brooke. Speaker Michael Martin was advised that he would not win an appeal to the High Court so he hired a new legal team; they appealed, and lost. Then they applied to get the judgement stayed. The judge ordered them to provide the full information.
Having won at the High Court over the 14 cases Heather Brooke said: right, now I want the others. “The Commons knew they would get a deluge of requests so they said they would publish them all in October (2008).”
Nothing appeared. “They said they would publish them in December. Again nothing appeared. In January they said, ‘it’s too complicated, we can’t do it.’ I had a suspicion they hadn’t done anything at all, so I put in an FoI request for the contract they had put out to scan the documents, and the answer came back that it had in fact all been done.”
That data is what was on the hard drive acquired by the Telegraph, and the delay was to give MPs the chance to delete — “redact” in the terminology — anything they wanted to. This censored version is what the Commons eventually released in June. The difference between them is what the battle was about, and the public could see it, clear as daylight, when the Telegraph was able to compare them. Heather Brooke has been vindicated by events.
“What I didn’t expect was the public outrage,” she says. “I find that the most heartening thing of the whole story. This has been a wake-up call to journalists as well as politicians, because they can see that the public ARE interested in this kind of old-fashioned story. And it does sell newspapers.
“Editors always used to tell me, ‘people don’t care about politics or MPs’. They couldn’t work out why I was so interested in them. But I have always had the philosophy that people are distanced from politics because they don’t have any real information about their MPs. I have always believed that if they did they would be incredibly interested, and I have been proved right, which is always good.”
So is she a bit smug now? “Oh God yes, mega‑smug.”