Openness and accountability

FOI is intended to:

  • promote a culture of openness and accountability
  • facilitate better public understanding of how public authorities carry out their duties, why they make the decisions they do, and how they spend public money.

There will be two ways in which information will be made available to the public:

  • some information will be automatically published in publication schemes.
  • some will be released in response to individual information requests.

The Act is retrospective so will apply to all information, including that created earlier.

Understanding Animal Research welcomes the greater openness that FOI will bring to discussions about animal research. With more good quality information about how and why animals are used, people should be in a better position to debate the issues. Overviews of all new animal research projects, in the form of anonymised project licence summaries, are placed on a special Home Office web site. This means that the UK provides more public information about animal research than any other country.

As the House of Lords Select Committee report of July 2002 stated, 'the availability to the public of regularly updated, good quality information on what animal experiments are done and why, is vital to create an atmosphere in which the issue of animal experimentation can be discussed productively.'

According to public opinion surveys 'having information and perceived openness and honesty are the two key considerations for the public in order for them to have trust in a system of controls and regulations about biological developments'.

 

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