I’m generally unimpressed by the standard of service delivered by public bodies such as government departments and agencies. And I am generally in favour of us, the public, holding their feet to the fire to ensure better behaviour. The Health and Safety Executive has never impressed me and that is why I was immediately interested when I was pointed to a legal case being taken by an individual (with help from others), involving the legal folk at Leigh Day with whom I worked very closely for six years through Wild Justice, involving potential harm to the public and where the legal issues have now boiled down to the implementation of the Environmental Information Regulations.
The paragraph above couldn’t have been written by many people but it is where my life and experience has taken me – supporting the underdog against an ineffective and sometimes corrupt state. I was immediately struck by the words of Ansel Adams ‘It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.’ which I first heard when I stood near his former home in San Francisco and believe that his words are absolutely true of the UK today as they were in the USA of the 1980s.
The EIR regulations are the slightly stronger equivalent of the general Freedom of Information regulations but applying to environmental information. Public bodies try to avoid answering difficult questions about what they knew, when they knew it and what they did and how they decided to do it. They’d rather we didn’t ask the questions and will delay and wriggle not to answer them. You need determination and grit to keep going and yesterday I talked to the claimant in this case who has both by the bucketful.
Pat O’Hanlon is the Claimant and she and her husband Mike (both of whom are in their 80s – by the way, Happy Birthday Mike!) have had help from Derek Baxter a Formby parish councillor – but Pat is the Claimant and she has been battling to get hold of information about what HSE knew about various events some of which are described in her crowdfunder on the Crowdjustice platform – click here.
I really warmed to Pat immediately I spoke to her. We see the world in the same way, it seems. Our politics are to the left but we don’t necessarily trust the state to act in our interests all the time.
Pat has been fighting this battle against the HSE since 2020 – more true grit than John Wayne and Jeff Bridges put together! And she has represented the case in front of a judge, against a barrister, herself – that is one hell of an achievement. But now she has roped in some lawyers for the final showdown and so needs to raise some cash to pay for it. I’ve donated £100 and I’d ask you to donate too. Please!
FOIs and EIRs are supposed to enable the individual, you and me, to question the basis of decisions made at our expense by public bodies. If we don’t fight for that right and press for it to be upheld fully and every time then we, the public, will be the losers. Pat is fighting that battle for all of us – the least we can do, I feel, is chip in to help her and to show that we appreciate what she has done.
Please donate to her crowdfunder – click here.
[registration_form]