Another Blow to Transparency

What has the farmer Hartmut Eifert of Hesse in Germany and an agricultural firm Markus Schecke GbR got to do with Blacka and the moors around Sheffield? Very little you might think. But the truth is that their action in the European Court of Justice has allowed Natural England to claim a pretext for withdrawing a feature on its website. This feature allowed the public to access details of subsidies to farmers and institutions, thus giving full transparency as intended by the European Commission.

Natural England has on its website a feature called Nature on the Map. It can be used to get details of which areas of the country come under certain statutory designations such as SSSI. So you can home in on Blacka Moor and other local sites and see various bits of information about them. It also had the facility for discovering where agri environment subsidies were being paid and also the amounts being paid and the person or organisation receiving those grants. I say 'had' because that has changed in recent months following a European Courts of Justice ruling. This follows legal action by wealthy German farmers who maintained that it infringed their privacy. The result of this is that we cannot any longer see how much money is being paid to subsidise cattle and sheep grazing on Blacka, on Burbage Moor and other local sites.

I have read the press release detailing the court's judgement and the reasons given for it. I am sure that the European Court of Justice does not mean that this information must be withheld. Instead it is saying that the Council and Commission are being disproportionate if they insist that all the information is published in fine detail on national websites. That is quite a different thing. NE could continue with their publication, according to my reading, if names were left off, or approximate figures were provided. But they seem to have taken down all that information leaving the public completely in the dark.

What we do know is that institutions hate being transparent and love to keep information to themselves. Knowledge is power. Given a chance, bureaucrats will calculatedly interpret any law in such a way that gives them the chance to decline requests for information. It will be interesting to see how this affects recent and future FoI requests.
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Further to this the information that has been 'pulled' that concerns us here applies to public land on which there is public consultation either ongoing or in the offing. How can people exercise their duty to hold accountable those who manage or make important decisions about public assets when they are denied the information they need to make judgements?

Answers on a postcard please or via the comments facility.

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Postscript 19th August

The website farmsubsidy.org is the best place to look for information on this, though when I tried to access it this morning it seemed not to be functioning.