For the last financial year, the government and Vodafone agreed that the state could save £5.3m on its payments to the mobile phone company.

This was one of a number of renegotiations with large suppliers pursued by the coalition after it came to power.

In October 2010 the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude told the Conservative party conference that the new government had saved "several hundred million pounds" in one year by modifying contracts with its biggest suppliers.

He said this was based on "dealing with them as a single customer instead of letting them play one part of government off against another".

But the Cabinet Office refused to provide a breakdown of this figure by supplier, in response to a freedom of information request from the BBC.

It did provide a departmental breakdown, which showed that the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Work and Pensions accounted for over half the total of the overall government savings target of £671m.

The Cabinet Office argued that releasing company-by-company details of savings would damage relationships with suppliers and jeopardise negotiations with them.

The BBC appealed to the Information Commissioner, who last month upheld the government's refusal, except where suppliers themselves consented to the release of the figures.

The only company to agree was Vodafone.

"We believe in being as transparent as possible in our dealings with the Government," said a Vodafone UK spokesperson.

The company denies that the savings agreed indicate that government departments were previously being overcharged.

"Our dealings with central government are now far more about helping government find a better way of working," the spokesperson said.

"We strongly believe that using our technology and expertise will save many hundreds of millions of pounds in areas such as property, energy and fixed-line communications. We are prepared to make an investment in providing services to the public sector to help the government secure the much bigger gains that can be made by working smarter."

Vodafone's financial relations with government have recently been highly controversial because of the company's tax affairs - and the sums involved in this dispute are much greater than the £5m savings - but in the context of these contract renegotiations, Vodafone has been more willing to be transparent than any other large Whitehall supplier.

It illustrates how private companies that do business with the state will increasingly have to face up to questions of openness and freedom of information.

The willingness of public sector suppliers to accept greater scrutiny of their contracts is going to grow in importance as an issue, in line with the pressure for transparency in value for money in public spending.

The Cabinet Office has got in touch to say that since the Information Commissioner's decision, another government supplier has agreed to the release of details of savings - the IT services group Capgemini. In its case, the savings agreed through contract renegotiation total more than £200m, although this figure is over several years until 2017.

The savings agreed with another supplier are expected to be announced later this week. This new policy of disclosing such savings represents a change in approach from the Cabinet Office since the commissioner's ruling.

The Cabinet Office argued that the BBC's FOI request should be rejected even when the companies themselves were happy for the information to be released, because by a process of elimination it could lead to other companies who were not so willing being identified. Now the government does seem keen to publicise some of the company-by-company savings it has agreed.

Last July the commissioner ruled that it was in the public interest for documents about the Hillsborough tragedy to be released, since it would "add to the public knowledge and understanding about the reaction of various parties to that event, including the government of the day".

This followed a freedom of information request from the BBC that had been rejected by the Cabinet Office. That FOI case was dropped after a government pledge to publish its files on Hillsborough via an independent panel later this year.

The BBC has seen now some of this material and on Thursday is reporting details from these documents.

Due to these disclosures, we now know that a few days after the tragedy in April 1989 Margaret Thatcher was informed about the views of senior officers from Merseyside Police. She was told that one of them blamed drunken Liverpool supporters for the terrible incident which led to the deaths of 96 of the club's fans as a result of horrific overcrowding.

The briefing she received also reported the assessment of the then Merseyside Chief Constable Sir Kenneth Oxford. He thought that a key factor was the presence of Liverpool fans without tickets and this was being ignored while the authorities were being blamed.

Sir Kenneth was a controversial chief constable who had often clashed with local politicians over his tough policing strategy, and was at this point close to retirement.

We already knew that private briefings accusing the Liverpool fans had been coming from South Yorkshire Police - this was the force responsible for the Hillsborough ground in Sheffield. It was later criticised for the poor crowd control that had actually been the main factor in causing the loss of life.

What the papers show

Lady Thatcher's then press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham has already revealed that when he accompanied her on a visit to the stadium the day after the tragedy, they were told the incident was the fault of a "tanked-up mob" of Liverpool supporters.

What we now know is that a similar message was coming to her, not only from the force which had made catastrophic errors in policing the FA Cup semi-final, but also from the top ranks of the police force covering the locality of most of the victims - the bereaved families and the anguished survivors.

Of course this document only reveals what was said in the period soon afterwards, and those involved may have changed their minds as further evidence came to light.

But it is interesting to note that the position of the senior Merseyside officers conflicted with that taken at the same time by some junior ranks in the same force.

In newspaper reports at the time, the Merseyside Police Federation was quoted as saying that the accusations against Liverpool fans were "ill-informed comments" which were "based on hearsay rather than evidence". The local federation secretary said that his phone had been "red hot" with calls from Merseyside officers demanding he speak out to "redress the balance".

In due course it was the view of the federation, rather than the chief constable, which was found to be correct by the official inquiry into the disaster by Lord Justice Taylor. He attributed the main cause of the incident to police failures in crowd control that led to a fatal crush in the Liverpool fans' section of the ground.

The BBC's report today also contains another interesting revelation: that there was unease within the government about what a senior Downing Street official considered to be Lord Taylor's "distinctly unhelpful" response to an approach to align his inquiry schedule with the government's political timetable.

In the wake of Hillsborough, Margaret Thatcher's policy priority was to press ahead with introducing a compulsory identity card scheme for football supporters. The government had already been planning this to tackle the hooliganism that badly affected the game in the 1980s (although the idea was never eventually implemented).

The Home Secretary Douglas Hurd met Lord Justice Taylor soon after the judge was appointed to carry out the inquiry. Lord Hurd tried to persuade him to consider the membership scheme in time to fit in with the government's schedule for pushing forward with it. The judge couldn't guarantee this, insisting his timings would be determined by the process of establishing the facts of what happened.

The current government has promised that official records relating to the disaster will be released through the Hillsborough Independent Panel. This was set up in December 2009 by Labour to work towards publishing these files, although cabinet papers were initially excluded from its terms of reference.

The panel has said it will complete its work by the end of June, although there are reports today that this deadline will be postponed. It is expected to release a very large quantity of documentation. The papers being covered today by the BBC are only a small proportion of the undisclosed material.

Today's revelations do not constitute a "smoking gun" or lend support to any kind of conspiracy theory, but they have added valuably to the state of public knowledge about the political reaction to the terrible events at Hillsborough in April 1989.

In brief, we have learnt that the top ranks of Merseyside Police helped to misinform Margaret Thatcher by wrongly blaming Liverpool fans. And we have learnt that there was dissatisfaction within the government at Lord Justice Taylor's refusal to adapt his inquiry to their political timetable for pressing ahead with an identity card scheme for football fans.

That's the view of David Cameron, which he expressed yesterday at the end of his evidence session in front of a House of Commons committee.

He distinguished between the increased transparency that derives from the publication of data (such as crime maps, local government spending and public sector contracts), which he is enthusiastic about, and what he called "the endless discovery process" of responding to FOI requests, which clearly doesn't appeal to him quite so much.

Perhaps this opinion is not surprising, given that the government has this week been fighting a tribunal case to avoid being forced to release its risk register for the current NHS legislation. The top civil servant at the Department of Health told the tribunal that publishing the register could lead to similar documents being toned down in future.

It's not the first indication that Prime Minister Cameron is becoming "the heir to Blair" in his attitude to freedom of information. We've already had reports of remarks in which he's said that due to FOI, "officials and ministers are increasingly reluctant to put on paper what they actually think".

Some advocates of openness will undoubtedly see Mr Cameron's distinction as really a dividing line between what the government wants to tell you and what you want to know, but it does raise a fundamental question about the purpose of greater state transparency. Is it about greater accountability in the delivery of public services, or it is about opening up the decision-making process?

I was one of a number of journalists who gave oral evidence last week to the Commons Justice Committee, which is currently conducting an inquiry into the workings of FOI (so far only the uncorrected transcript is available). We were asked why the law had not had more impact on the quality of public debate.

My answer was that while FOI has made it much easier to obtain facts and figures about the performance of public services, it has had nothing like the same reach into the policy-making process and internal discussions. This is the area where ministers and officials have much deeper concerns about the impact of disclosure and requests have met greater resistance.

Mr Cameron's stance can be seen as an illustration of what one international academic authority on FOI, Professor Al Roberts, has called "executive pushback" - attempts by political leaders to counter or undermine FOI laws.

The starkest example of this has been in Ireland, where the government introduced up-front fees for making freedom of information requests. In the US successive presidents have fought battles over the scope of FOI. And in India currently there are efforts to constrain the extent of the right to information law which has featured in numerous controversial disputes between citizens and officials.

On the other hand, another expert David Banisar argues that many countries with FOI laws have not experienced the same kind of political backlash.

The Commons Justice Committee is continuing with its inquiry, and the outcome should influence where the future of FOI in the UK will lie.

This is a controversial topic given recent allegations about ministers and political advisers using private email to seek to avoid FOI. These claims are currently under investigation by the Information Commissioner.

The department has apologised for missing the legal deadline by so long, stating that the delay is because the DfE "is experiencing a higher than usual volume of FOI requests".

Under the Freedom of Information Act, this is not a valid reason for failing to meet the law's time limits, and it is unusual for a government department well aware of this to respond in this way.

The DfE's information rights adviser Andrew Partridge has told the BBC in an email:

"I very much regret the delay that you are experiencing in relation to your FOI request which we received on 3 October and which should have been answered by 31 October.

"At the moment the Department is experiencing a higher than usual volume of FOI requests, and this is leading to delay in some cases. But I fully accept that the Department has failed to meet the statutory deadline in this case. I can only apologise for the delay, and assure you, as the officer responsible for preparing the reply to your request that I am working to take it forward as quickly as possible."

In October the BBC asked the department for any guidance it held about the use of personal email accounts in relation to freedom of information.

This followed reports that the Education Secretary Michael Gove and his advisers had used their private email rather than departmental systems for some sensitive messages on the basis that this would fall outside the FOI Act.

Last week Mr Gove insisted to the House of Commons Education Select Committee that he has followed Cabinet Office advice that "anything that was held on private email accounts was not subject to freedom of information requests".

However this stance conflicts with the policy of the information commissioner Chris Graham, who in December made clear his view that personal email accounts are not excluded from freedom of information searches when they have been used for official business.

The Information Commissioner's Office is still considering a number of complaints, including from the Financial Times, about the Education Department's apparent failure when responding to FOI requests to supply relevant emails sent from personal accounts.

The position adopted by Mr Gove and the Cabinet Office also contrasts starkly with an earlier assessment made by the DfE's own information rights adviser, Mr Partridge (the author of the recent reply to the BBC).

It has been reported that last year Mr Partridge told the department's permanent secretary that the requesters' right of access to material under FOI was not limited to the contents of the departmental email system if "information held in personal accounts may relate to the business of the department".

Mr Gove made it clear to the MPs on the education select committee that he preferred to abide by the advice the DfE had then obtained from the Cabinet Office rather than that from his own departmental FOI official.

The BBC also asked the Cabinet Office in October for a copy of any guidance it held on the subject of personal email accounts and FOI. The Cabinet Office replied last month stating that it does not hold any such information.

Is this compatible with the fact that it has clearly offered advice on this topic to the Department for Education? Possibly, if for some reason the advice was kept purely oral and not committed to writing. The BBC is asking the Cabinet Office to review its FOI response.

When the Labour MP and education select committee member Lisa Nandy put down a parliamentary question a few days ago asking for a copy of the advice, she got the reply that "information relating to internal discussion and advice is not normally disclosed".

Mr Gove says he is now waiting for the Cabinet Office to provide updated guidance. The Financial Times is waiting for the information commissioner to rule on its complaints. The BBC is waiting for the Department for Education to answer our FOI request.

When all this happens, the development of the government's policy on whether ministers and officials can use private email to protect messages they want to keep secret may become clearer. Meanwhile, the wait continues.

The information covers individuals who declined an honour from 1950 to 1999 and have since died. It identifies 287 instances [PDF list], including 89 rejected MBEs, 89 OBEs, 61 CBEs and 27 knighthoods.

For some people such honours and the official recognition they represent can be a high point of their lives, but clearly for others they have been unwanted, whether for reasons of principle or otherwise.

This official data confirms much that has been reported previously, for example that a serial refuser was the painter L S Lowry, who over a period of 21 years dismissed the offer of an OBE, a CBE, a knighthood, and twice becoming a Companion of Honour.

The list also confirms that those who have rejected knighthoods include the actor Robert Morley, the writer Aldous Huxley and the physicist Paul Dirac, while those who dismissed lesser honours include the author Roald Dahl, the painter Francis Bacon and the biologist Francis Crick.

Some who accepted one honour previously or later refused another, such as the film director Sir Alfred Hitchcock who had earlier turned down a CBE before he was knighted.

The list also discloses some apparently new information, however. The author and publisher Leonard Woolf declined to be made a Companion of Honour in 1966, the journalist and editor of the New Statesman Kingsley Martin turned down a knighthood in 1965, and the critic and academic F R Leavis rejected a CBE in 1966.

As far as I know, these facts (among others in the list) are previously unreported, although I am not an expert on their biographies and could be wrong.

The list also identifies many more obscure figures who for whatever reason did not want to accept the honours on offer.

The Cabinet Office has been keen to preserve the secrecy which has traditionally surrounded the honours system and at first refused to reveal the list in response to a BBC freedom of information request. The BBC then complained to the Information Commissioner who ruled that it was in the public interest to disclose the information for honours rejected before 2000.

The Commissioner argued that disclosing more recent rejections was more likely to undermine the integrity of the honours system and that 2000 was a reasonable if arbitrary cut off point.

The data does not cover living individuals since that may constitute personal information protected by the Data Protection Act. And to avoid doubt it is restricted to people where, according to the Cabinet Office, "it is immediately apparent as a matter of fact that a relevant individual is dead".

This means that the individuals listed are only a limited proportion of all those who have declined honours. It does nevertheless show that over the decades there have been many individuals who have not wanted to accept a form of recognition which the British state wanted to bestow on them. What we don't know, however, are their various motives.

The company has been consulted by the government about bringing its role in awarding qualifications under the Freedom of Information Act.

This is part of a wider debate on the blurring demarcation line between public and private responsibilities and how far a legal right for citizens to get access to information can intrude into the private sector.

That's a complex issue which will also be examined in a tribunal hearing on Tuesday about whether privatised water companies have to release data in compliance with the Environmental Information Regulations.

McDonald's is one of over 150 private bodies which award qualifications and are being considered by the Ministry for Justice for inclusion within FOI. The company offers workplace training which has been approved as a nationally accredited vocational qualification.

The organisations under consideration include others that provide academic or vocational qualifications recognised by Ofqual, such as exam boards like Edexcel, sporting groups like the Amateur Swimming Association and professional associations like the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. The full list has been obtained by the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

It's all part of the Ministry of Justice's plan to extend freedom of information to a wider range of bodies which may be private themselves but have public functions. It had been previously been reported that this could cover organisations such as the Law Society and the Advertising Standards Authority and harbour authorities, as well as awarding institutions.

Ministers have also indicated an intention to extend FOI to housing associations in England.

In contrast in Scotland the issue has also arisen, but the SNP government has decided not to extend the Scottish FOI law to housing associations, private contractors involved in providing public services, and other parts of the private sector which could be held to have public responsibilities.

If McDonald's and other UK private sector awarding bodies end up being covered by FOI, that will only extend to questions about their role as awarders of qualifications. It won't provide the public with any greater right to know anything more about the company's food.

I'd like to be able to tell you what McDonald's thinks about this but I can't. The company acknowledges that it has responded to the MoJ consultation, but adds "as this is a closed consultation, the information we have submitted is confidential."

Some people might think this is not exactly within the spirit of openness. But what can be said confidently is that if the burger company is enthusiastic about being made subject to the impositions of the FOI Act, that would make it very unusual.

We don't yet know how the UK government will respond to the outcome of its consultative exercise.

While ministers mull over how to proceed on extending the Freedom of Information Act, a case involving the regulations governing the disclosure of environmental information is to be heard by the Upper Tribunal on Tuesday. The Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) do cover private bodies that carry out functions of public administration, but this can be a difficult criterion to assess.

The angling campaign group Fish Legal is bringing an appeal in a case involving three private water companies, Southern Water, Yorkshire Water and United Utilities.

This follows an earlier case in which the tribunal ruled that the privatised water companies in England and Wales are not covered by the EIR.

Fish Legal has been arguing that this position deprives the public of a necessary legal right to data on water pollution and should be referred to the European Court of Justice, since the EIR implement a European Union directive stemming from the Aarhus Convention on public access to environmental information.

The water companies insist they have a good record of releasing environmental data without having to be bound by the regulations. United Utilities says: "We simply feel that subjecting water companies to the regulations would place an unnecessary administrative burden on the sector. The information can be obtained elsewhere, so why add to the bureaucracy?"

In the UK and internationally FOI has proved to a useful tool for making the various facets of the state more accountable to individual citizens. It has not been aimed at increasing the accountability of powerful private organisations.

However, successive and continuing government policies (and again this is an international phenomenon) of privatisation, contracting out, public-private partnerships, the private finance initiative, academy and free schools - all aspects of the private provision of public services - have increasingly entwined the public and private sectors and now focused attention on how far freedom of information should reach.

Next year could mark an important phase in the history of the right for the public to have access to state information.

This is because MPs on the House of Commons Justice Committee are holding an enquiry into how the FOI Act has been working in practice. The committee has recently called for evidence from all those with a view on the strengths and weaknesses of the law in operation.

The Justice Committee has already received a memorandum from the Ministry of Justice, which sets out some of the terrain that may be contested. I've now read this report in more detail than when writing an initial reaction on the afternoon it came out, and it's an important pointer towards the concerns of public authorities.

The chief one of these is clearly cost. Many authorities feel that the current cost threshold for rejecting requests as too expensive is too high, and/or that they should be allowed to take a wider range of activities into account in determining their costs (for example, redacting documents, which is currently excluded from the cost calculation).

Of course frustrated requesters sometimes complain that the cost threshold is too low. We can expect the trade-off between costs and benefits of FOI to be one of the main themes in the forthcoming scrutiny of the Act.

The MoJ will be publishing new research into the cost of FOI compliance next year. It has commissioned a study of 48 authorities to measure the amount of staff time it consumes.

This is clearly much easier to quantify than the benefits, whether in the form of public spending saved or the even more intangible factors of transparency and public understanding.

Some authorities also complain that the procedure for declaring a request "vexatious" is too difficult, so that it is often less time-consuming to answer what they regard as pointless or obsessive questions (possibly for example about their readiness for attack by zombies) than it would be to reject them on this basis.

But it is striking that few more fundamental concerns are reported by the ministry. The basic structure of how FOI works - a general right to know, subject to exemptions and in many cases a public interest test - therefore seems to be widely accepted by public authorities.

The report says most FOI practitioners had few issues about the operation of most exemptions, suggesting "they are felt to be adequate in scope", according to the MoJ. My initial blog about the report discussed the mixed views on policy formulation and the "chilling effect".

It is also interesting to note how the practical operations of FOI would have been regarded very differently if the same assessment had been conducted three to five years after the Act was introduced, which is the period within which new Acts are supposed to face post-legislative scrutiny.

Any account at that time would surely have focused on delay, delay, delay as the key problem with the system, due to the immense backlog of cases then overwhelming the Information Commissioner's Office.

Yet that problem has been much reduced since the currrent commissioner Chris Graham took up his post, with the beneficial consequence of encouraging public authorities too to make their FOI processing faster and more efficient.

The MoJ report is based on the views of public authorities and acknowledges that it is harder to survey the experiences of requesters of information. But it does note that "concern still exists" about the time authorities can take to assess the public interest on whether material should be disclosed or to consider an internal review of an initial decision.

As we look forward to next year, it's also worth stating that significant results could flow not just from the policy work of MPs and government, but also from some important individual cases that are awaiting legal decision.

These include a forthcoming Supreme Court ruling that should finally determine the extent to which the BBC's activities are covered by FOI requests, a tribunal case on whether private water companies can be forced to disclose material in line with the Environmental Information Regulations, and another tribunal case on whether the Information Commissioner was right to rule that the government should release its register of risks on its NHS reform plans which are currently going through Parliament.

But this view doesn't seem to be universally shared within the civil service.

This is reinforced by a report issued today by the Ministry of Justice, which assesses how the Freedom of Information Act has been working in practice.

Views within public authorities on whether FOI has a damaging "chilling effect" on frank discussion and minuting of meetings appear to be very mixed, according to a study commissioned by the ministry.

Some officials state that FOI has forced them to adopt "better record management" and internal communications are now "more formal and professional". Others interviewed report that internal messages have become "less detailed and informative".

This diverse picture fits with previous research conducted by University College, London, which similarly found both positive accounts of records being "more thorough and focused" and negative ones that they were becoming "less detailed and more anodyne". A mixed impression is also given by the latest UCL analysis of the impact of FOI on local councils.

This issue is just one point that quickly stands out from a lengthy and detailed document, which will need to be disgested at greater length.

The report also seeks to evaluate the performance of FOI against the objectives of openness, accountability, improved decision-making and public participation, as well as examining the administrative burden imposed on public authorities.

The MoJ refers to the "successes" of FOI, but says they "do not come without cost". It raises the balance between these two factors with the following element within its conclusions:

"The Government's commitment to transparency stands alongside its commitment to reduce regulatory burdens. A question worthy of consideration is whether the current FOIA regime strikes the right balance between those two objectives."

This is the first stage in the process of "post-legislative scrutiny" of the Freedom of Information Act about to be undertaken by the House of Commons Justice Committee. The committee will now consider the ministry's memorandum along with evidence from other interested parties, as it examines how well the law has been operating.

That's the clear implication of new guidance issued today by the Information Commissioner, Chris Graham, who says the law has been "somewhat misunderstood" in the past.

His statement may irritate some of those who already find FOI a source of aggravation, but I think it is unlikely however to result in much additional disclosure, since information could still be held back for other reasons.

The commissioner's intervention stems from the fuss in September over revelations in the Financial Times about the use of private e-mail by the Education Secretary Michael Gove and his advisers. The Department for Education denied this was an attempt to pre-empt the possibility of FOI requests.

But it was followed by stories about civil servants using text messaging with the aim of evading FOI, and reports of "panic" in Whitehall at the prospect of such tactics being stopped.

Mr Graham's verdict today is not remotely surprising. Information is covered by FOI if it is held by the public authority or by someone else on behalf of the authority - although it's not covered if held on behalf of another person.

So messages for purposes of official business are covered, even if sent via someone's personal Hotmail. But material that is truly personal or purely party political rather than the business of the authority is excluded, whether or not processed through the official email system.

In other words the mode of communication makes no difference. It doesn't matter whether your words are scribbled on removable sticky notes or chiselled into tablets of stone; it's equally irrelevant whether your thoughts are conveyed by text message or carrier pigeon.

The law seems pretty clear, as indeed was pointed out by various FOI specialists at the time of the Gove row. Yet the Education Department has claimed there was contrary guidance from the Cabinet Office, according to the Financial Times. However, this advice is apparently "not written down".

The BBC has made an FOI application to the Cabinet Office for any relevant guidance it has issued, but over two months later this has still not been answered.

Doubtless all this will now result in numerous FOI requests for the texts and Gmail messages of ministers and officials. But don't expect to be reading them soon.

The ICO advice simply confirms that they are subject to FOI in principle. Yet, just like any other document, they could still come under one of the exemptions in the FOI Act, such as policy formulation or the free and frank exchange of views.

So public authorities could refuse to release them if they reckon disclosure would be against the public interest. I think it is safe to predict that this is what public authorities will generally decide.

They could be overruled on appeal to the ICO, but I also expect that in practice the commissioner may demand a high threshold for the public interest before ordering disclosure, given the likely nature of most of the material and the commissioner's precedents on preserving a "private space" for discussions.

So the ominous forecasts of "fear" in Whitehall over "everything" being disclosable are hardly justified.

This issue has arisen in other countries, such as the US where some states have particularly far-reaching FOI regulations.

Many of Sarah Palin's private emails may have been published (she used her Yahoo account for Alaska state business). And there have also been a number of court cases resulting in text messages being released, such as a notorious collection of exchanges between the former Mayor of Detroit and his chief of staff.

In the UK now there remains the important question how thorough public authorities will be in checking private email accounts and text messages in response to FOI applications.

As one FOI officer argues, it will come down to "conscience and professionalism". He says "in practice, whether you provide emails to answer an FOI is still, largely, a matter of conscience". We may see how much people's consciences are tested in the light of the new guidance.

The ICO is clearly aware of the possibility of abuse. I was very interested to see that Mr Graham is now recommending that where private email is used for public authority business, "an authority email address must be copied in to ensure the completeness of the authority's records".

Now if public authorities really do ensure their staff comply with that, it will surely have an impact on what is put in some of those emails.

And not only in government departments like the Department for Education. I am aware for example of academics who use personal email for university business, as much to seek to escape the Data Protection Act (under which individuals can apply for the personal information held about them) as FOI.

So don't expect much more information to be released publicly as a result of Mr Graham's clarification of the law. But the dislike which some public sector staff feel towards the inconvenient requirements of the Freedom of Information Act will surely increase.

Still, there's always waving flags to create semaphore signals. That would get round FOI, because there's no lasting record.

But attitudes differ in some other countries. I have just been reminded of this, having seen a visualisation of the details of Finland's highest taxpayers.

Compiled by a Finnish data journalist Jens Finnas, it takes their names, gender, age, region and other facts to present his personal graphic exploration of their characteristics (with a political point at the end).

It is based on publicly available tax data, released last month for 2010 and used by the media to compile league tables and generate searchable databases.

Of course none of this information would be accessible on British tax payers, however big their individual contribution to the Treasury's receipts.

But under the Freedom of Information Act, the BBC has obtained some information on the collective amount of income tax paid by the UK's biggest taxpayers.

This shows that the number of super-rich individuals paying tax in the UK has increased dramatically, which must reflect how the incomes of those at the top of the scale have been growing. And the amount of income tax obtained from such people has therefore also boomed.

Over a five year period up to 2010 (the latest data available) the number of UK taxpayers with an annual taxable income over £10m more than doubled from 131 to 274.

The income tax this growing group had to pay between them increased a little more rapidly, jumping from £0.8bn to £2.1bn. (This was before the 50 per cent top tax rate came into force in 2010/11).

UK taxpayers: taxable income over £10m

Tax year

Number of individuals

Total income tax liability (£bn)

2005-06

131

0.8

2006-07

181

1.3

2007-08

218

1.7

2008-09

192

1.7

2009-10

274

2.1

Source: HM Revenue & Customs FOI responses

There's no likelihood that the British tradition of individual tax secrecy will change. And perhaps the Scandinavians could actually be moving in this direction.

In Norway the government this year prevented media sites from promoting their own searchable tax databases of the kind created in the past by, for example, the newspaper Aftenposten or the TV2 television network, although figures for individuals can still be used in stories about them.

And Norwegian citizens can still search the database on the official site of the country's tax administration - but I gather they first need to use their national identity number to register.

The government has promised to release these papers by June next year. On this basis the BBC is dropping its FOI application for them.

The Information Commissioner has also consented to this settlement. As a result the tribunal hearing scheduled to consider the government's appeal against disclosure in February next year will no longer happen.

The Cabinet Office has pledged that it will reveal the material by 30 June if it has not already been issued by the Hillsborough Independent Panel. This is the body set up to review and consider for publication most government records about the 1989 tragedy at the Hillsborough footbal stadium, in which 96 Liverpool fans were killed.

The BBC would like to see the information released as soon as possible, but has accepted this settlement on the basis that in practice it would only lead to a maximum delay of a few weeks.

The Information Rights Tribunal usually takes some weeks to issue a judgement and then gives the public authority another 35 days to comply with it. This means that even if in February the tribunal upholds the case for disclosure argued by the BBC and the Information Commissioner against the Cabinet Office appeal, the material would probably not be published until May 2012 anyway.

The case stems from an FOI application made by the BBC in April 2009, in which we asked for documents relating to cabinet and other discussions about Hillsborough involving the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the wake of the tragedy. Our request was turned down by the Cabinet Office but backed by the Information Commissioner who ruled that releasing the files would be in the public interest.

When announcing its plan to appeal against this, the government argued that all disclosures should be made by the independent panel, which it established several months after the BBC's FOI request. The panel says it intends to report next spring. However, cabinet records were outside the panel's terms of reference.

Some possible content of the documents involved is hinted at by outline arguments in a preliminary submission to the tribunal by the Cabinet Office this summer, at a time when the government was intending to proceed with its appeal against publication.

The Cabinet Office developed the argument it apparently previously presented to the Information Commissioner that releasing the material now could damage the public relationship with the police so much that even 22 years after the event the public would be less willing to co-operate with the police.

Its submission in August told the tribunal that "absence of controlled disclosure would be likely to focus public debate on the policing alone (rather than the full range of relevant issues) and cause greater damage to relations between the community and the Police."

The Cabinet Office went on to argue that rejecting the BBC's information request was necessary for the sake of "maintaining good relations between the police and the public" and "ensuring that the public co-operate with and assist the police."

The official Taylor inquiry into the causes of the tragedy blamed South Yorkshire Police for failures in crowd control that led to a fatal crush in the Liverpool fans' section of the ground.

This hint may fuel further suspicions among some campaigners about the police actions and what the government knew about them at the time. But at least matters should now become clearer by June next year.

The BBC's view is that the response of the government of the day to Hillsborough is an important matter of public interest. This can only fully be examined by the release of all relevant documents, including cabinet records that were outside the remit of the government's independent panel.

By pursuing this FOI request the BBC has ensured that some potentially crucial files will not remain secret. As a result the general public and those directly affected by the events should end up better informed about how the government reacted to the worst disaster in British sporting history.

What effect does this have in practice? Not much in many cases, according to a survey released today by the international news agency Associated Press.

In an attempt at a global round-robin research exercise, its journalists submitted requests about terror arrests and convictions to 105 states that give citizens a legal or constitutional right of access to information.

AP reports that only 14 countries responded in full within their legal deadline, while another 38 eventually answered most questions. Over half of the countries did not release anything at all.

The agency highlights comparatively prompt and full responses from Turkey, Guatemala and Mexico, while drawing attention to lengthy delays from the US and Canada. Countries that did not respond include China, Pakistan and several in Africa.

AP has made the raw material from its survey available on the DocumentCloud website.

However, one nation with a freedom of information law that has certainly had an impact is India.

Evidence for this is provided by today's moving edition of the BBC Radio 4 series Crossing Continents. It examines the intimidation and violence faced by some anti-corruption campaigners who have made effective use of the country's Right to Information Act.

For me, one of the most striking parts of the documentary is the interview with India's Chief Information Commissioner, Satyananda Mishra, who says he is not very alarmed by these incidents and compares them to road accidents as if they are an inevitable if regrettable occurrence.

While the Associated Press survey confirms there is a big difference between a theoretical right stipulated in law and its actual implementation in practice, the experience of India demonstrates that a freedom of information act can be a powerful weapon for transparency, with the potential to greatly disturb some who prefer their activities to remain unscrutinised.

That's the good news conclusion of the latest academic study, which suggests that while the number of council FOI requests increased last year, the overall cost of handling them nevertheless fell - because local authorities have become faster and more efficient.

The research team at the Constitution Unit at University College, London estimate that there were around 198,000 FOI applications to English local authorities in 2010, a sizeable 20% increase on their calculation of 165,000 for 2009, and approaching double the 2008 figure of 119,000.

They reckon that the number of requests to councils has increased consistently year on year since FOI began in 2005, when they put it at around 60,000.

However they also report that the average time a council takes to process an FOI application has dropped dramatically, from 16.4 hours back in 2005 through 11.6 hours in 2008 and 8.9 hours in 2009 down to only 6.4 hours last year.

They therefore estimate that freedom of information cost English councils £32m in 2010, a drop on their figures of £37m for 2009 and £34m for 2008.

This cost calculation is based on the standard rate of £25 per hour laid down in the FOI regulations. This is clearly to some extent an arbitrary figure, so the overall annual costings must be of limited accuracy.

But it still seems likely that a significant fall in costs is real, given the quicker processing of requests and the fact that the main cost of FOI is staff time. The report notes that internal assessments by some local authorities report actual costs which are significantly lower than the UCL study's findings.

The faster handling times imply that English councils have made major and impressive improvements in their FOI processes. This could be the result of greater experience of the law, speedier assessment of cases where precedents have now been set, having established policies and proven systems in place, and perhaps also economies of scale, as well as greater cost-consciousness in recent times.

From my personal experience in the past as a frequent FOI requester, I have often thought there were opportunities for greater efficiency in the FOI systems of some public authorities.

This is based on having come across extensive pointless and unjustified redactions, additional complex administrative processes devised for what are seen as "sensitive" requests, and obstructive or clearly inadequate refusals which only prompt further requests and time-consuming, expensive internal reviews.

In further good news, the researchers state that the cut in costs was accompanied by improvements in performance. Compared to 2009, requests made in 2010 were more likely to be settled within the time limit of 20 working days and to lead to full disclosure. Fewer resulted in no information being released at all, and there was also a drop in the number of internal reviews demanded by dissatisfied requesters.

The most common material sought by FOI applicants to councils was financial information. The report notes the level of requests for data about personal salaries and expenses of individuals peaked in 2009 in the wake of the MPs' expenses scandal, falling back in 2010.

The UCL researchers suggest that the coalition government policy of councils automatically publishing spending data on items over £500 has made little difference to FOI requesting.

Some caveats are needed. The study is based on responses from 104 of the 353 local authorities in England. It's possible that the ones which are more efficient or had a better story to tell had more time or inclination to respond.

The report also contains an interesting collection of broader comments from FOI officers who participated in the survey, which provides useful insights into their attitudes.

They range from those who think freedom of information has boosted openness, accountability, ethical behaviour and public involvement, to others who believe it has had no positive impact whatsoever and think the policy of releasing all spending data over £500 is a source of "extra work and virtually no benefits".

My colleagues in BBC Stoke have been following a dispute between Stoke-on-Trent City Council and the local water theme park, WaterWorld, dating back to 2008, about possible arrangements for swimming provision.

In September following mediation the council apologised to Waterworld for causing "considerable confusion" over an "alleged contract". Last month after public pressure it revealed it had settled the matter by paying the water park around £22,000, while its own legal costs were a similar figure.

The council is refusing to disclose further information about the dispute and its settlement. In response to an FOI request from a BBC Stoke reporter, it argued that revealing more background to the case "would be likely to prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs", which is one of the exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.

It then went on to argue that disclosure would restrict the council's ability to settle future legal disputes on a confidential basis. But the key reason it presented for why the material should be exempt was as follows:

"Disclosure of the information would be likely to prejudice the authority's ability to meet its wider objectives or purpose due to the disruption caused by the disclosure and the diversion of resources in managing the impact of the disclosure".

In other words, publishing the information would cause too much fuss.

Or at least that is what it appears to be saying, which seemed strange to me. When I asked for elaboration the council added that (as discussed at a council meeting) further disclosure could risk breaching the settlement and jeopardise mediation processes, but on the point of what this key section means it told me that its refusal letter "is self-explanatory".

BBC Radio Stoke is now appealing the refusal to the Information Commissioner.

This procedure will take some time but could have a crucial impact on the future development of freedom of information in the UK. It seems to have left some FOI campaigners worried about how the Act might be scaled back and some public bodies and private companies worried about how it may be further extended.

At a seminar yesterday the justice minister Tom McNally said some government colleagues were not keen on the Act being subject to this, but he had pushed it through. He insisted it will give both proponents and critics of FOI the chance to make their case.

The Ministry of Justice is working on a report it plans to submit before Christmas to the Commons Justice Committee, which will then consider what other evidence to take.

The MoJ has also commissioned some research into the financial cost of FOI for public authorities, but this is not expected to be completed until the new year.

The trade-off between costs and benefits will clearly be one important element in the scrutiny process. The deputy information commissioner Graham Smith told the same seminar that he was worried that FOI work might suffer disproportionately in an era of public spending cuts, a fear that many FOI officers share.

Lord McNally acknowledged there was "a tension within government" on how much to extend freedom of information to private sector bodies, although he added that the split was not along party lines.

He justified the decision to give many communications with the Royal Family an absolute exemption from FOI, while emphasizing it was a cabinet decision

"It's one of those rough and ready decisions where you try to marry political reality with principle", he said. "Leaving the monarchy within the FOI Act would be a goldmine of intrusion for journalists."

Lord McNally insisted that his personal enthusiasm for FOI had not been undermined by his experiences as a minister, although he recounted an anecdote that suggested some of his colleagues might be following Tony Blair down the path of disillusion.

When he recently informed a meeting of fellow Lib Dem ministers that he had just extended FOI to a number of additional bodies such as the Association of Chief Police Officers, they replied "What did you want to do that for?" But perhaps this was just a joke.

Freedom of information research shows that the Royal Mail is making an increasing sum of money by selling these goods at auction, amounting to nearly £1m last year.

Over the past six years the postal service has more than doubled the income it generates in this way, from £432,000 in 2005/06 to £933,000 in 2010/11.

Financial year

Royal Mail income from auctions

2005/06

£432,000

2006/07

£485,000

2007/08

£646,000

2008/09

£798,000

2009/10

£824,000

2010/11

£933,000

The items are undeliverable because the address is inadequate or the recipient has moved, and there is no return address.

Valuable goods which cannot be delivered or returned are stored for up to four months. If they are not claimed, they are then sold at auction. The company insists this is always a last resort, where the sender cannot be traced.

Although the sums involved are very small in terms of its annual turnover, the Royal Mail says the proceeds are used to recoup part of the cost of its National Return Letter Centre based in Belfast, which aims to return undeliverable items to the sender wherever possible.

This centre processes a total of around 20 million items a year, mainly business mail, at a cost of over £4m.

While the quantity of letters sent is falling, the number of parcels being mailed is growing due to the rapid spread of online shopping and sites like eBay.

This suggests that the increasing auction income could well be linked to the popularity of online commerce, if more items of higher value are now being sent through the post.

The figures were obtained from the Royal Mail by the BBC through a Freedom of Information request.

But there are new questions about the Cabinet Office case for resisting publication of these records.

The Hillsborough petition calls for the release of all government documents relating to the disaster, "as requested by information commissioner Christopher Graham". Mr Graham was adjudicating on a freedom of information application made in 2009 by the BBC.

It will now have to be discussed by the Commons backbench business committee, along with the petition to deprive rioters of benefits which is the other proposal to have passed the 100,000 target since the coalition government's new e-petition system was introduced.

The Commissioner ruled last month that the government should release files we had requested relating to discussions held by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about the incident, which caused the death of 96 Liverpool fans and was later blamed on a failure of police crowd control. He argued that it would add to public knowledge and understanding of how the Thatcher government responded to the event.

Last week the Cabinet Office announced that it would appeal against Mr Graham's decision, triggering a highly effective publicity drive by Hillsborough campaigners which has led to over 100,000 signatures being added in less than a week.

The Cabinet Office argument is that any release of information should be managed by an independent panel (set up after our FOI request was made) which is to review the documentation about the Hillsborough tragedy and assess what should be made public.

I have now looked more carefully at the terms of reference for this panel, and it is far from clear that it will actually promote the release of all the documents we asked for under FOI. Its planned programme of disclosures will exclude "information indicating the views of ministers, where release would prejudice the convention of Cabinet collective responsibility".

Yet the material we applied for includes records of cabinet and other ministerial meetings, and correspondence between the offices of Mrs Thatcher and her Home Secretary Douglas Hurd. These documents could easily come under the exception in the panel's terms of reference to do with revealing the views of ministers.

This suggests there could be a significant gap between the information the BBC has requested and the records that the panel could end up releasing.

Chris Graham, the Information Commissioner who officially oversees whether public bodies are implementing the Freedom of Information Act, or the tens of thousands of members of the public who have signed an e-petition calling for ministers to release documents relating to the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster?

But it hasn't lost all the files associated with the contract. It does have the restaurant receipt for the meal with Mr Wallis which was claimed on expenses by Dick Fedorcio, the Met's Director of Public Affairs.

The Information Commissioner has now ruled that releasing the files would be in the public interest.