Tony Blair counts himself as an idiot for bringing in all the Freedom of Information legislation. Of all the things the former PM could have chosen to want to go back and do all over again it’s this, the thing that at least in part let us know what his Government was up to.

Gosh.

Now this has a financial services implication. First, it could, though it probably won’t, give an excuse for some restrictions further down the line. This would be, as I think almost every adviser understands, very bad news.

This FoI legislation has proved to be one of the few checks on the FSA and to a lesser degree the Treasury when both have very few checks on their power. Yes it is irritating and occasionally even I have wondered, if quite the right questions were being asked, sometimes about the habits of individual regulators. But we can at least see exactly what the regulator is spending the regulateds’ money on for things that aren’t quite clear in the FSA’s budget.

The greatest shame about the FoI regime is that the Lautro 19 case fell at one of the final hurdles. That really could have been game changing introducing some restrospective fairness into regulation – imagine that. It also is ridiculous that the FOS has not had to disclose the qualifications of its personnel. But at least it allowed us to know that Gordon Brown was warned by officials about the consequences of his pension tax raid. (That was down to a very good friend of mine at the Times, who you may remember from her days on Financial Adviser, Helen Nugent.)

I don’t, unfortunately, think it has been as effective as it might have been. This is partly because the information that shows FSA incompetence often makes front page news say on Money Marketing or front of site news on Citywire but not in the nationals. It means that the embarrassment isn’t always enough to change behaviour even at an ‘evidence-based’ regulator.

But it has been something at least.

I have also heard a lot arguments about the cost of such requests. But I would simply repeat the argument of a finer journalist than me Heather Brooke, (she who broke the expenses scandal) who points out in her book The Silent State, that for every FoI employee, central Government employs 12 press officers. In effect the Government employs 12 people to tell you want they want you to hear for every one they employ to help you find out what you want to hear.

I will now give a personal view on the big stuff.

The amount of spin, the influence of senior press people actually damaged the fabric of our democracy during the Blair and Brown years. The Freedom of Information Act made it a bit less bad, thank goodness.

OK. It is not been quite so bad at Canary Wharf but it is as I say a useful tool. I must think of a request or two to put in – something a bit more specific but along the lines of  ”about that financial crisis which you failed to spot how exactly did you manage that?”

I must say I really did think it was April FOS day when I read of the FOS taking part in National Complaints Day. The FOS admittedly wasn’t directly offering an Ipad for best complaint, but the organising firm Complaint Community was.  

Any complaints system, any Ombudsman system, particularly a free one, ought to tread carefully. It has to promote its service – better than the alternative of course, but it has to be careful not to stir up unfair claims. This shows it isn’t doing anything of the sort.

I think it is also time that the FOS adjudications were vetted, i.e. take a number of files across different categories of cases, and have them checked for fairness to both parties to the dispute and for consistency.

Whether you want a FOS to exist or not, if it is run the wrong way it is a huge drag on saving and investing levels, it makes doing all sorts of business for all sorts of companies less viable. It can at its worst greatly increase all the various gap, savings, protection advice.

Someone influential needs to take a long hard look at what it does. This farce is just one symptom of how things may be going wrong.