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Clinging to the cowardly tradition of secrecy
SECRECY appears to have an unbreakable hold over public institutions in Britain. We can only be envious of the citizen’s right to know in the United States where much more information is put into the public domain.
The stranglehold of secrecy showed its face at the Town Hall on Monday when attempts to discover the details of a report into the flawed refurbishment of Swiss Cottage Library were swatted aside.
Don’t worry, assured leisure chief Flick Rea, the report is “dreary”, as if this alone disqualifies it for public consumption. Most local government documents are “dreary”. Few are written in electrifying prose. But that surely cannot be an argument for keeping them a secret.
Who is putting a lid on the flow of information? Civil servants employed at the Town Hall as well as elected representatives. Who elects them? The people.
Who pay the salaries of civil servants? The people.
Then why on earth cannot the people be given all the information that goes into the making of a public document?
Which brave political party will break the mould? So far, all the established parties, Labour, Tory and Lib-Dems cling to a cowardly tradition that may have made sense to our Victorian forefathers but has no place in the 21st century.
PFI is proving to be a costly device
THE new hospital built in Euston Road, the University College London Hospital, was lauded as a piece of daring architecture in keeping with the historic importance of one of Britain’s leading teaching hospitals.
The wherewithal for the project came from Private Finance Initiative funds, a pipeline for new public buildings much cherished by the John Major government and later by the Blair administration – a device to keep public sector expenditure off the nation’s balance sheets. But up and down Britain, several of these projects have been found to have been flawed in construction.
Our sister paper Islington Tribune recently revealed the need for urgent repairs for the new Moorfields Eye Hospital, another PFI project. Both UCLH and Moorfields are new buildings which should not need extensive repairs – unless the original construction itself was flawed either in design or workmanship.
Very high standards of medicine are practised at the UCLH. It is an embarrassment to the National Health Service that it is not necessarily matched by the design and construction of the building.
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