The ‘legislative framework’ for a long-awaited Freedom of Information Bill should be introduced to the House of Keys by the end of the year.
But Chief Minister Allan Bell told Tynwald that the exact date would depend on resources being available within government.
And he urged members to ‘go into this with our eyes open’ as estimated cost of anything up to £1 million would mean less money to spend on other services - while FoI could be abused by those with commercial agendas or personal vendettas.
Asked by Speaker Steve Rodan when he intended to introduce FoI legislation, Mr Bell replied such a measure was among the Council of Ministers agreed list of priority objectives.
He said: ‘I intend to introduce a Bill to the branches which provides a legislative framework for suitable freedom of information rights by December 31 this year.
‘That date is largely dependent, though, on officers being able to devote time to finish preparing the Bill and being able to finance a project, which will span government, to train staff and make procedural preparations. It has not been possible to assign a person full time to this. However, I hope to be in a position to rectify this very soon.’
The Speaker said: ‘Until we actually get this legislation, the ability of Manx citizens to hold their government to account currently falls short of international standards.’
Mr Bell replied that people should not under-estimate the effectiveness of the existing Code of Practice on Access to Information and while are some areas that ‘perhaps we need to improve on’, to his knowledge there have been ‘very, very few’ instances of requests for information being refused.
But he said FoI will be a ‘very expensive exercise’, costing anything up to £1 million to fully implement, and to train and employ officers.
‘That money will have to come from departmental expenditure. We will need to decide among ourselves whether in fact we can justify perhaps cutting £1 million off the Health Service, or we bring in the Freedom of Information in exchange.’
Middle MHK Howard Quayle asked whether procedures would be put in place to stop abuses of the legislation by a very small number of people at significant cost.
Mr Bell said Mr Quayle had made an important point. There is no question that there are a small number of people who have abused this system in the UK. We need to go into this with our eyes open. This is not rolling out everything for the public to scrutinise and pick over, and perhaps abuse for either their own commercial ends or their own personal vendettas.’
