I don't know what the government's justification would be for a ministerial veto. We do know that there is some experience with a ministerial veto in the U.K., for instance. In the U.K., there is an information commissioner who has order-making power. Those decisions can be reviewed by the courts in the U.K., and then there could be a ministerial veto either after the commissioner's order or after the court's order.
There has been a very recent U.K. Supreme Court decision. The court has considered that the ministerial veto was unconstitutional because the minister actually reviewed a decision of the court. The court decided it was not appropriate for the executive to override a decision made by the judiciary. That's the current situation. It was on the famous “black spider” letters by Prince Charles in the U.K. Some of you may have heard about that.
In my view, if the government were to decide to provide the commissioner with an order-making model and to then say they are going to have a ministerial veto at the end, I think for taxpayers' sake, they should just scrap the entire independent oversight model and make their political decision. Ultimately, what's the point of having an entire investigation, an entire adjudication, a potential judicial review, and then a ministerial veto, when the whole process in between would have decided that the information should be disclosed?
It then creates an oversight model that is actually a mirage and we're back into complete political decision about disclosure. I would definitely not be in favour of such a thing. If that were the direction of the government, I think we should stick to the ombudsman's model, because at least we have an independent process with an independent court review process. For political reasons, it's actually very odd to make a decision and then have it reviewed and then override that whole review process.
I will be submitting my position on that as part of the consultation process. This is something that we were not expecting, and we have just started to do our research. We will provide our representations on that as part of the consultation process to the government.