The Department for Health was ordered to release a report about what it got wrong during the pandemic by the government's own transparency watchdog.

Instead of releasing it, it is spending taxpayer cash on a legal bid to try to keep the report a secret.

thetimes.co.uk/article/whiteh… The bid could cost the public up to £130,000, based on the previous costs of these actions. The move has sparked cross party outrage.

Tory MP William Wragg, chairman of PACAC committee said: “Put simply, this report should be released.”

Cast your minds back a couple of months to LDR gate. Bristol City Council was criticised for questioning whether a local democracy reporter was supposed to be asking questions of mayor Marvin Rees at a regular press conference. Local Democracy Reporters are BBC funded local journalists who are meant to make sure politics at council level are properly covered, and work for an array of local titles.

Official government advice was sent to health ministers by WhatsApp and private email, posing a risk that key information about how the pandemic was handled has been lost, the transparency watchdog has found.

thetimes.co.uk/article/pandem… In an unprecedented move, the ICO has taken regulatory action over serious breaches of both transparency and data protection rules by the department.

The Department for International Trade (DIT) has broken #FOI laws more often than it has followed them, new figures have revealed.

thetimes.co.uk/article/whiteh… The ministry responded to #FOI requests within normal time limits on less than one in five occasions in the first quarter of this year. Including permitted extensions, it provided just 45 per cent of responses within legally mandatory timescales.

Loans meant to support desperate businesses through the pandemic were misused to fund gambling sprees, home improvements, cars, watches and garden refurbishments, a Times investigation has established.

thetimes.co.uk/article/suitca… In some cases, people even tried to smuggle suitcases filled with cash from Rishi Sunak's bounce back loans out of the country via airports.

The revelations, drawn from Insolvency Service records, raise questions for government about how seriously it took pandemic fraud.

Corporate responsibility minister Lord Callanan has launched an unprecedented attack on the Freedom of Information Act, describing the landmark transparency and anti-corruption law as "a truly malign piece of legislation.”

thetimes.co.uk/article/freedo… Callanan serves as the government’s UK champion for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a role promoting transparency and anti-corruption measures in the oil and gas sector.

thetimes.co.uk/article/anti-c…

For some non-Covid news, and as a bit of recent political history, I’ve been released more than 100 pages of internal press office communications relating to the Home Office’s fried chicken box saga. You may remember back in heady 2019 that there was an uproar after the government provided takeaway boxes with anti-knife crime messages to chicken shops around the country.