Tram censorship

Published on Friday 25 November 2011 00:00

IT IS appalling that the recent request made under the Freedom of Information act for information relating to the Edinburgh tram project was reduced to a meaningless shambles through the deliberate blanking out of sections of the relevant documents.

This a distortion of what that system of freely-available information access was intended to produce.

That is bad enough, but what is even worse is that the entire project was financed using public money and those charged with supervising and monitoring it were also paid using public money, ie our taxes, so in effect the project belongs to the people not Edinburgh council. However, there is another, almost surreal element to add to this travesty.

Should anyone choose to challenge the heavily-censored documents in court they would have to do so using their own money, not so Edinburgh council. It would employ the best legal talent money can buy, once again funded by the bottomless purse supplied by the taxpayer, and continue to do so until either it was forced to concede defeat and make the censored information available to the public, or until whoever was making the request ran out of money.

There are many precedents for this and it is a practice that has to be challenged.

Brian Allan

Keith Street

Kincardine-on-Forth

Clackmannanshire

Comments

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Hazelkaye

Friday, November 25, 2011 at 07:58 PM

Just wait for requests re the "EGIP" and "RAIL 2014" CONsultations 'evidence' to follow in similar vein!

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Alastair Scott

Friday, November 25, 2011 at 01:51 PM

Will the Scottish Information Commissioner not investigate this? And is it not a bit odd that it's a Labour MSP who is demanding the information when her own party was one of the ones which pushed it through?

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Argungu

Friday, November 25, 2011 at 01:45 PM

With the Council suggesting that Edinburgh Tram documents had been delisted after a year, then agreeing that they were available but would cost £600 to retrieve, and Government resorting to redacting documents related to a Freedom of Information request by Labour MSP Kesia Dugdale, clearly the expression “you ain't seen nothing yet” is likely to gain traction. Nor are we likely to see anything in similar documents in the future either. If for no other reason than those culpable for the Edinburgh Tram appraisal, design, contract documents, and contract mismanagement may be planning to roll up their tents and depart, or have already done so, it is essential that the required Public Inquiry be inaugurated now before documentary evidence and those involved mysteriously become unavailable.

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Mercutio

Friday, November 25, 2011 at 01:58 AM

The "forces of redaction" at work.

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