Those are two of the hopes for freedom of information: that it would improve the quality of decision-making within government, and make government more trusted. So if I take each of those in turn, we found it hadn't had much impact on the quality of government decision-making, but part of this was the difficulty that so many things had influenced the quality of government decision-making, particularly in the last ten years, that freedom of information could only be a very small part of any change that had taken place.
It hasn't improved trust at the central government level. This is not a fault of freedom of information, but more the political environment in which freedom of information exists. A few FOI-based stories get into the press. They're generally the rather negative ones. So they have no effect or a negative effect on public levels of trust. We also found that pre-existing low levels of trust shape what sorts of requests people make. So sometimes they make requests that confirm their low levels of trust that already exist.
We found that things like how the media and government interacted and fought shaped issues around trust. It wasn't really FOI itself.