By Tom Curtin
Curtin&Co had the pleasure of Pauleen Lane, Vice Chair of the Infrastructure Planning Commission at our annual Christmas Lunch at Browns in London. She gave an excellent talk on the work of the IPC and its committment to transparency. I wish it well on a difficult journey.
But what is transparency? Already politicians are extremely uncomfortable with the Freedom of Information Act, especially when it comes out of their expenses. Does transparency mean that every scrap of information must be placed in the public domain? Every jotting, every notebook, every flipchart? This could lead to a bureaucratic nightmare and a bonanza for the manufacturers of scanning machines.
From my own experience in the nuclear industry some years ago, the sad truth is that there is no other way forward. I was a strong advocate at that time in making everything public. Invite in Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anyone else who wishes to trawl over the files and the notebooks.
Sure there will be skeletons in the cupboard. The science will not always be perfect. There will be thoughts which one would rather not have public. So what? After a few headlines media will soon get bored and move onto something more interesting. And so will everyone else.
You cannot be a little transparent. And if you really want to be cynical about it, if you want to hide a needle, first build a haystack.
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