Rhys Hurley is the investigative lead at the New Zealand Taxpayers Union
Over the last few weeks, one of the most important jobs in Britain has become vacant. Not the one that dominated the headlines last month, nor Nigel Farage’s rage quit. This was a departure that has gone comparatively unnoticed: that of John Edwards, the Information Commissioner.
Dismissing his exit as a niche matter for Westminster insiders would be a mistake. This isn’t some random quango chief executive whose departure matters only to SW1 people-watchers. Rather, the role oversees two of the most critical functions of modern governance: taxpayers’ ability to access public records and their right to personal privacy.
This right to interrogate the civil service and elected officials is one of our few remaining safeguards outside the ballot box. Protecting the ability of the general public to question anything from the cost of putting in a new cycleway by the council to the policy documents for a government decision is how those outside Parliament hold those within to account. Crucially, Freedom of Information requests (FOIs) allow us to access information that is not already in the public domain, bridging the gap between what an authority chooses to publish and the information the public deserves to see.
The figures show why this transparency matters now more than ever. In 2025, public bodies received a record 94,526 FOI requests, a 14 per cent surge on the previous year. The complaints statistics are equally telling: of the 640 complaints escalated to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in 2024, only 369 original decisions to withhold information were upheld.
Public appetite for official scrutiny is growing, and taxpayers need robust leadership, not a passive referee.
Ironically, it took an FOI to discover the ICO has been exploring its own ways to clamp down on the flow of inquiries. The proposals ranged from five requests per year per agency, to allowing individuals to be declared vexatious over individual requests, and even requiring greater identification before accepting a request.
From individual requesters to investigative organisations, this change would only result in less accountability. This would, in turn, give ministers greater control over what can stay hidden and who can ask questions.
A pledge to “tighten up” legal response timeframes means nothing when this very group, which should be championing disclosure, also wants to refuse to investigate an FOI when there is “little public interest in its disclosure”. The body tasked with upholding information rights should not be deciding on behalf of taxpayers how far those rights should extend.
The central problem here is that the structure of the job is conflicted.
The Commissioner is expected to balance competing priorities by protecting personal privacy and enforcing data protection rules, while also ruling on FOI requests made to agencies and defending the right to access public data.
Both are important duties, but each requires different instincts. When both roles sit inside the same office, led by the same office-holder, it leads to one priority dominating the other, depending on the leadership of the day.
Having previously served as New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner, Edwards’s pre-appointment committee hearing focused heavily on issues around big tech and accessing remedies. At the same time, he refused to commit to reinstating the strict FOI compliance monitoring standards previously used to keep foot-dragging agencies honest. Yet it is not only transparency advocates who have been left disappointed, with privacy experts also raising other concerns about the office’s direction.
This is not only a British problem. Across the Anglosphere, governments are attempting to make it harder to question them.
Australia has only temporarily paused reforms on the basis that its system costs around $100 million AUD a year while ignoring the unknown savings from promoting a culture of transparency. New Zealand is investigating restrictions of its own despite the guiding principle that official information should be released unless there is good reason to withhold it. Even Canada, where access-to-information fees have existed since 1983, continues to expand the grounds on which requests can be refused.
The UK may already proactively release more information than these countries, but the fact that four of the last eight Prime Ministers have criticised the system for stopping good government shows our leaders still don’t understand transparency. Too often those who champion transparency from opposition come to see it as an obstacle to governing, rather than a safeguard against governing badly.
If the system is truly under pressure, the answer is not to make it harder for taxpayers to ask questions, but to demand more information be proactively published and that unnecessary bureaucratic sign-off processes are stripped out. These backlogs would naturally fall away if requesters were treated less like a threat and more like a routine part of open government.
Edwards’s departure needs to be used as an opportunity for a rethink of the structure of the office itself.
Liz Kendall, the former Science and Technology Secretary, believed that dropping the single commissioner model and appointing non-executive directors would fix the office’s cultural issues. Yet the fundamental problem will remain: a body split between two very different mandates will still struggle to produce better results.
Groups like the TaxPayers’ Alliance and New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union are not usually the first to call for more commissioners. Yet this may be a rare example where splitting the job would lead to less secrecy rather than more bureaucracy, with one agency focused on personal data and digital regulation, while a separate body would champion a stronger FOI system.
The Information Commissioner’s Office cannot continue competing with itself.
"The purpose of the Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets but to protect officials." - Sir Humphrey Appleby, 'Yes Minister'.