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SO sensitive were Cabinet Office mandarins about disclosing rampant junketing across Whitehall over recent years that when the Eye waged an ultimately successful battle to unearth the details, they orchestrated a cover-up that stretched to deliberately breaking their own freedom of information laws.

Only now, following the intervention of the Information Commissioner, can some details of this cover-up be revealed.

Back in September 2007, the Eye made FoI requests to all Whitehall departments for details of hospitality received by their top officials from April 2004. Blind panic appears to have ensued as the “clearing house” for requests in the Cabinet Office put out advice to all departments that the requests should be refused.

A deceitful and arguably illegal ploy
For schmoozing between 2004 and 2006, “departments should cite the cost threshold” (an exemption from disclosure if it would take more than 3.5 days to find the information). Since departments are required by the civil service code to keep registers of hospitality and the Cabinet Office could not foresee departments’ time costs, this was always a deceitful and arguably illegal ploy.

It duly hit a snag when an official in the Department for Work and Pensions reported an official in his bosses’ private office having “collected this [information] from hospitality logs where they exist without exceeding the disspropriate (sic) cost limit. I therefore cannot see how we can cite this exemption,” even though, said the official, “I am sure that [redacted name] would not want to break ranks.” All other departments simply said what the Cabinet Office had told them to, almost certainly untruthfully.

There then seem to have been attempts to persuade officials in the DWP to relent and tell a porkie, a frustrated internal Cabinet Office email reporting the DWP official as “adamant that he won’t say disproportionate cost as he’s looked into it”. A Yes Minister-style compromise was eventually agreed: the response to Private Eye would simply ignore the excuse – but not provide the information anyway.

A strategy of deception
A letter from the DWP duly arrived on 29 November 2007 saying that information for 2007 would be published the following year (in the event it took even longer). No mention was made of details for 2004-06. The department had thus knowingly blocked the release of information it knew it could disclose – on the face of it, an offence under the freedom of information act. Only after the Eye repeatedly complained and recounted to the Information Commissioner what were then strong suspicions of an orchestrated cover-up did any information finally emerge.

More alarmingly, the strategy of deception appears to have been hatched at the highest level. One of the Cabinet Office emails tells the DWP that its response “will need to be cleared with your Permsec” (the permanent secretary in charge of the department, Leigh Lewis).

‘Openness and transparency’
It was all part of a laughable ploy to start releasing hospitality information with a positive spin. When a full list of hospitality for 2007 was eventually published in February 2009, the Cabinet Office claimed it reflected its “commitment to openness and transparency”. Among the thousands of junkets from companies with much reason to schmooze influential mandarins was a trip to the opera courtesy of BP for cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell.

When the Eye first asked O’Donnell’s department for its communications with other departments, the information was refused as it would inhibit “free and frank” advice in government. After three years the Information Commissioner has forced it to admit this was nonsense and hand over the incriminating emails. Whether the commissioner will take action against the dishonest perversion of the freedom of information process by officials simultaneously trumpeting “openness and transparency” remains to be seen.