Campaign for Freedom of Information

The Protection of Official Information Bill, introduced by MP Richard Shepherd in 1988, would have replaced section 2 with a narrower measure that included a public interest defence.

Shortly after the Labour Party won the 1997 general election, MP Richard Shepherd drew a high place in the private members' ballot and introduced the Public Interest Disclosure Bill, which received Royal Assent in July 1998.

[7][8] Following Labour's election in 1997, the Campaign's chairman James Cornford was appointed a special adviser by David Clark, the cabinet minister responsible for drawing up the government's FOI proposals.

However, after a well-received white paper, Your Right to Know (CM 3818), Clark was relieved of this role and responsibility for FOI was moved to the Home Office under Jack Straw.

[22] He referred to the enquiries about parking tickets issued, and then cancelled on appeal, by traffic wardens employed by a council contractor and who were offered incentives to issue tickets, the qualifications of assessors who were employed by a contractor to verify that incapacity benefit claims have been properly administered, and the cost of providing television and telephone connections for prisoners in a privately managed prison.

It has been instrumental in a number of successful Tribunal appeals involving the police's failure to provide information to a murder victim's family, relatives denied information about a hospital death, toxic land contamination, the withholding of an MP's policy correspondence on the spurious grounds that disclosure would breach his privacy, and in overturning a decision that would have introduced an entirely new layer of secrecy about Ombudsman inquiries.

The organisation recently intervened in two Supreme Court cases, with the Media Legal Defence Initiative in support of The Times newspaper's ultimately unsuccessful argument that Article 10 of the ECHR incorporates a right to FOI[24] and in support of The Guardian's challenge to the government's use of the ministerial veto in the FOI Act to block the disclosure of the then Prince Charles' advocacy correspondence, the so-called Black spider memos, with government departments.

In January 2015, the Campaign celebrated its 30th anniversary with an event hosted by ARTICLE 19 at the Free Word Centre at which Ian Hislop and Des Wilson spoke.

It marked the occasion by selling special edition T-shirts featuring Tony Blair (who has described the introduction of FOI as one of his biggest mistakes[26]) in a cartoon designed for it by political cartoonist Steve Bell.