April 09, 2007	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 20, 1428

sSOME years back a super duper civil servant just before his retirement told me that if all the summeries that were sent up to the Economic Committee of the Cabinet (ECC) or to the federal cabinet itself by the relevant officials since independence were made public, their authors and their collaborators would be lynched by the public on the streets of Pakistan.

This was certainly a sweeping and perhaps even a highly exaggerated statement by a disgruntled CSP official who had failed to get one more extention. But the officialdom’s propensity to treat even the most non-vital decision-making process as national secret even to this day makes it difficult for one to dismiss outrightly the assertion of this gentleman.

The Freedom of Information Act now in vogue in Pakistan has also been so designed by its authors as to deny access to vital and at times even non-vital information in the possession of the establishment. The process of obtaining information under this Act has been made so cumbersome that at least journalists and even researchers feel hardly inclined to go this route to cross check and substantiate their stories and research conclusions.

Take for instance, the defunct sale of the Pakistan Steel Mills. Despite a threadbare scrutiny of the deal by the Supreme Court before it was thrown out of the window, the government has continued to shy away from making public how and where the ‘ommissions’ and ‘commissions’ were committed in the process of arriving at the decision to sell such a valuable family silver to fly by night adventurers.

And so far there has been rolling of the heads of those who tried to con the nation. And then there is this question of how did the government arrive at the decision of handing over the Gawadar to a Singapore company and a stock broker. And why isn’t there a satisfactory explanation from the government about what is actually happening in the PIA? What is the real story behind the ban imposed by the EU on PIA?

The reason why I thought I should briefly recall all this and raise some questions urgently relevant to the country was the on-going debate in the British media about a slip Chancellor Gordon Brown is alleged to have made when he announced his first budget in 1997, his alleged attempts to cover up the slip and the media’s two-year long efforts to pursue the Freedom of Information Law route to get its hands on the very process of decision-making which led Brown to withdraw ‘stealthly’ tax credits on pension funds and which is supposed to have caused the pensioners to lose a hefty amount in the last years of their lives.

Here it is the political bosses who seem to have refused to listen to correct advice from the civil servants and the latter instead of speaking out at the right time have gone along with the wrong decision in the interest of their jobs. In the case of Pakistan, most of the time it is the civil-military bureaucracy which takes the politician on a ride.

Chancellor Brown’s decision to abolish divdend tax credits is estimated to have cost Britain’s pension funds about £100 billion since 1997. By 2005, the growth of public sector jobs and generous settlements had pushed the accrued unfunded public sector pension liability up to £530 billion, according to government estimates. This is a staggering jump from £295 billion in 1998, and one which some pensions experts have argued is understated, because the government is too optimstic about the returns it can generate. Stephen Yeo, of the actuaries Watson Wyatt, has reckoned the real cost at £960 billion.

What the media is concerned about as well is the way Brown is said to have fought for two years to prevent the publication of documents that showed that the pensions policy ran counter to civil service advice. The government is then said to have engineered the release of those records on (what was assumed to be) an ideal day to bury bad news. The media generally held that the manner in which the official advice was disclosed – late on Friday night, after MPs had departed for their Easter holiday, when Mr Brown was in Afghanistan and in response to a two-year-old request under freedom of information laws – has added to Mr Brown’s reputation for hiding from trouble.

When that ploy failed, Ed Balls, Mr Brown's chief adviser at the time, asserted that the policy had been urged on the government by the CBI. The CBI has since denied it had made any such suggestions.

Meanwhile, the prime minister came to the rescue of his Chancellor insisting that the decision had been taken by the whole government. Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Mr Blair said: "I fully supported the decision then. I believe it was the right decision then and the right decision now. This was a decision taken in 1997 and, incidentally, taken by the whole of the government."

But Derek Scott, a former economic adviser to Mr Blair, has now disclosed that the prime minister had doubts about the decision to scrap dividend tax credits, but "did not want to go against Gordon".

A senior former Treasury official, who worked closely with Mr Brown in the early years, has been quoted by media as saying that the plans to abolish dividend tax relief were brought in from outside the Treasury. This contradicts claims from Ed Balls, that ministers were acting on advice from Treasury civil servants.

The concern was shared by a number of civil servants including Terry Burns, now Lord Burns and then the Treasury's permanent secretary, who was among those anxious about the sums of money involved in the scale of the changes proposed by Mr Brown.

The former senior official told media that there was quite a lot of nervousness about it.” What would be wrong is to assume this was a measure taken over the dead body of the Treasury. Equally it would be wrong to say this was a policy that was advocated by it, because it came from outside”.

"The Treasury was broadly sympathetic to this type of restructuring but it was very nervous about the scale and speed of the changes." The insider's account was backed up by Mr Scott, who advised the prime minister not to do it. "But he took the view not to go against Gordon," he said.

Mr Scott, who later wrote Off Whitehall, a controversial account of his time in Downing Street, said: "We knew that some people in the Treasury were very nervous about it. "Undoubtedly there were people who were worried about the implications for pensions and that was why I personally was opposed to it as well."

The lesson here for the politicians is, never try to ignore advice of the civil servants and for civil servants never to try to go along with the political boss if they think the decision is going to adversely impact on a large section of the people; and never to try to suppress information and deny access to information to media.