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The Government, Mad Cows and the Public: Access to Information and the BSE Crisis

The report by Lord Phillips into the Conservative government's handling ofthe BSE crisis has obvious similarities with the report by Lord Justice Scott into the sale of arms to Iraq in that both reveal details of the inner workings of government normally kept from public view and both discuss the justifications for keeping particular items of information secret from the public. However, whilst Scott's report was scathing about minister's attempts to conceal from Parliament information about changes in policy concerning the sale of arms to Iraq, the report by Lord Phillips report makes rather milder criticisms of the way in which the public were informed about the BSE crisis and the ways in which ministers responded to the development of the disease. It is critical of the culture of secrecy that pervaded the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, particularly in the early stages of identifying the disease, but found no evidence that officials or ministers set out to deceive the public; rather that they communicated a (subsequently) unjustified belief that BSE posed no threat to human health. Whilst the report is sympathetic to the difficulties of telling the public about the risks of transmissibility of the disease, when even the possibility of transmissibility had not yet been confirmed, it nevertheless draws attention to 'institutional and political failure up to the highest level'. These failings clearly ranged much wider than access to information but, collectively, contributed to a situation where the public were misled about the risks of a disease whose impact on the health of individuals may not become apparent for some years to come. On those grounds alone the report merits some consideration by those interested in the way in which public affairs are conducted in this country. The Phillips report was published in October 2000 and debated in the House of Commons in February 2001. It is mildly ironic that this debate followed shortly after the passing of the Labour Government's Freedom of Information Act (2000) since some of the lessons learned from the Phillips Inquiry might usefully have been incorporated into the Act. Much of the debate