Kenneth Roy
We’re in it for the money?
For half a year, we have been banging on about secrecy in Scottish public life. Our concerns were formalised some time ago in the campaign we call ‘Open Scotland’ – an attempt to convince anyone who cares to listen that there is a need for greater transparency about who does what and how much they are paid from the public purse for doing it.
Part of this campaign has been directed at secrecy over top management salaries in the NHS in Scotland. We have identified no fewer than seven NHS boards – half the total – which fail to disclose in full in their annual accounts the salaries and/or pension details of their senior people. This is unacceptable. I am surprised that anyone in public life should find it acceptable. It is unacceptable in principle for a very simple reason: the public is entitled to know how much the people running the National Health Service are earning. It is unacceptable in practice for an equally simple reason: there is a sense of dismay at the level of what are crudely termed ‘fat cat salaries’, particularly in the NHS.
The Prime Minister has expressed his personal dismay and insisted that the salaries of the top public sector earners throughout the UK, some of whom he considers are being paid excessively, will be posted on government websites: that these people will be named and, by implication, shamed. But, given the lack of co-operation at a high level, this may be easier said than done. The Auditor-General for Scotland, Robert Black, told the Herald a few months ago that the Scottish Review was mistaken in its belief that he was compliant in the refusal of so many NHS managers in Scotland to reveal their salaries or pensions; Mr Black’s position is that he wishes there to be complete transparency but is powerless to insist on it.
Despite this discouragement, we press on. Last December, we filed a freedom of information request to NHS Shetland, one of the seven NHS offenders and incomparably the worst. Its chief executive, Sandra Laurenson, is the only chief executive in Scottish public life who refuses to divulge salary. We asked for the salary and pension details of Ms Laurenson and several others. The board had 20 working days to respond to this request. Its flat refusal within three hours suggested, not only a lack of poise, but an absence of any serious consideration. We were informed brusquely that this was personal information covered by data protection. We were not surprised by this response and asked for an internal review of the decision. Same result.
In late January we appealed to the Scottish Information Commissioner. A few days ago we received a helpful reply from Donald Thomson, the officer assigned to our case. But when I say that it is helpful, I do not mean that it is reassuring; simply that Mr Thomson has carefully set out the legal position. He confirms that information regarding an individual’s salary and pensions arrangements is personal information as defined in the Data Protection Act. The executives at NHS Shetland, and the many other public officials of a secretive nature, are entitled to withhold this ‘personal information’ unless – and here is the essential caveat – the applicant seeking the information (in this case, the Scottish Review) has legitimate interests in obtaining it and the disclosure is necessary to achieve these legitimate interests.
Mr Thomson, very fairly, is giving us an opportunity to state our legitimate interests and to say why they outweigh those of the six individuals named in our request. We intend to do so – fully. But they can be summarised in a single sentence. Our legitimate interests are identical to those of the public’s.
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01.04.10
Issue no 229
Why
Alton
Towers?
Kenneth Roy
on the Lanarkshire
school bus accident
[click here]
Mistakes
and other
errors
Robin Downie
on the language of
Purcell and the Pope
[click here]
Why don’t we
mind our
languages?
R D Kernohan
on the Scottish
reluctance to learn
foreign languages
[click here]
When friends
fall out
Alan Fisher
on the frosty relations
between America
and Israel
[click here]
Deer
The April poem
by Gerard Rochford
[click here]
SR’s freedom of
information campaign
[click here]
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