Let's be clear.....

The House of Commons have voted to exclude their correspondence from the Freedom of Information Act. This has produced cries of outrage and accusations of hypocrisy. MPs say it is to protect the confidentiality of constituency correspondence. You know me - I'm a cynic, and I find it difficult to accept that their motives are purely altruistic, but the suggestion made by some of their critics that correspondence from constituents is already sufficiently protected by the Data Protection Act fails, I fear, to differentiate between punishment and protection. The Data Protection Act is there to punish those who misuse data which falls within its ambit, but the crucial word there is "misuse" - in other words for the Act to be called into aid, the data has to have been used, which means that from a privacy or confidentiality point of view it's very much a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Excluding that data from the Freedom of Information Act, on the other hand, means that you can't misuse the data, because you can't get hold of it in the first place, and whatever their motives, that's what MPs voted for the other day.