Freedom of Information Bill — Purpose of Act — 4 Apr 2000

Robert Smith MP, West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine voted in the minority (Aye).

The Majority voted to prevent a clarification of the statement of purpose with the sentence, "The purpose of this Act is to facilitate public access to information held by public authorities." and the insertion of a new Clause[1] which said:

The purposes of this Act are to extend progressively the right of the public to information held by public authorities to the maximum extent possible, consistent with the need to protect interests specified in exemptions, so as to promote-- (a) the accountability of public authorities; (b) informed public debate on public affairs; (c) public participation in the making of decisions; and (d) public understanding of the powers, duties and operation of public authorities.

Many of these purposes have been written into the Code of Practice for the Act.

Historical Hansard | Online Hansard |

Public Whip is run as a free not-for-profit service. If you'd like to support us, please consider switching your (UK) electricity and/or gas to Octopus Energy or tip us via Ko-Fi.

Party Summary

Votes by party, red entries are votes against the majority for that party.

What is Tell? '+1 tell' means that in addition one member of that party was a teller for that division lobby.

What are Boths? An MP can vote both aye and no in the same division. The boths page explains this.

What is Turnout? This is measured against the total membership of the party at the time of the vote.

PartyMajority (No)Minority (Aye)BothTurnout
Con0 128 (+2 tell)081.3%
Independent0 1033.3%
Lab339 (+2 tell) 0082.0%
LDem0 34073.9%
PC0 2050.0%
UUP0 2020.0%
Total:339 167079.8%

Rebel Voters - sorted by party

MPs for which their vote in this division differed from the majority vote of their party. You can see all votes in this division, or every eligible MP who could have voted in this division

Sort by: Name | Constituency | Party | Vote

NameConstituencyPartyVote
no rebellions

About the Project

The Public Whip is a not-for-profit, open source website created in 2003 by Francis Irving and Julian Todd and now run by Bairwell Ltd.

The Whip on the Web

Help keep PublicWhip alive