When two Cornish care assistants tried to expose two fellow staff members who they said were assaulting and mistreating residents, the care home took no action. Nor did the regulatory body. They resigned and sued for constructive dismissal. It was only when they made a request under the Freedom of Information Act that they discovered that the regulator had privately criticised the home for failing to report allegations made by seven other members of staff. An employment tribunal found in their favour. Better still, the home has since improved.

This is just what the Freedom of Information Act was meant to do: tilt the world back a bit towards courageous citizens and away from a State that instinctively clings to information as power. Since the Act came into force in 2005, all kinds of facts have been brought blinking into the light: planning proposals, the performance of cardiac surgeons, policemen with criminal convictions, the 13 meetings that Lord Falconer of Thoroton had with one casino bidder.

Perhaps that last item proved too much. The Lord Chancellor, who was so full of praise last year for the new era of openness that his department had set in train, is now part of a concerted effort to slam the door. Freedom of Information is tiptoeing away from us, back down the corridors of power, amid such a welter of arcane regulations that only the big news organisations have noticed.

At first sight the proposals look modest. Take pity, says the Government. We are inundated with requests for information (120,000 a year) and this is costing us too much (£35.5 million in 2005). Five per cent of the requests create 45 per cent of the work. We need to discourage such calls on our generosity. Why should we spend our time collating the number of sex acts (this is true) perpetrated on Welsh sheep?

Fair enough, you may think. Government has to run the country. But wait. They are already allowed to refuse “vexatious” requests and those that are too bulky. The new regulations will give carte blanche to block anyone who tries to throw light on issues that are complicated or embarrassing. Even FoI officials in government have complained to the Campaign for Freedom of Information that, in trying to tackle the 5 per cent, the Government could end up refusing more than 50 per cent of requests.

At the moment, public bodies and government departments can refuse to supply information that would cost them more than £450 or £600 respectively to collate. They may only include in that cost the finding of the information, charged at a flat rate of £25 an hour. Now the proposal is that they should include the cost of “consulting” about the request and “considering” whether to disclose it. So any official will be able to stick a finger in the air and calculate that — sorry, Mrs Brown — your request is just too expensive.

Ministers are targeting “serial requesters” and the “uncooperative”. While many nutcases may fall into that category, so do many citizens, campaigners and investigative reporters. Some of us may seem to verge on the lunatic in our obsession with seeking the truth on certain matters. But we are deadly sane. It would be utterly Orwellian to offer Freedom of Information only to those who do not seek it, or who seek it casually. Requests should continue to be judged on what is in the public interest, not what is in the interest of the authorities.

The Government describes its proposals as a “blunt instrument”, but that it will be tempered through guidance to be as cooperative as possible. This is naive. Many of those who use FoI regularly have discovered that, while some public bodies bend over backwards to be helpful, others can be less so.

John Sweeney, of the BBC, making a programme about possible links between Lord Drayson’s political donations and his government contracts to supply vaccines, was given straight answers from independent health regulators but only obfuscation from Whitehall. Dominic Kennedy, of The Times, was repeatedly blocked by the Department for Education last year in his attempts to get basic information about known paedophiles who had been allowed to continue working as teachers. He asked for the information in January but only received it in October, after Ruth Kelly had been moved and on the day that the Government announced — hey, presto — that it had changed its policy.

The truth is that Freedom of Information has only just begun to work. I cannot vouch for the usefulness of the 62,825 requests that were made to central government last year. Roughly 60 per cent were made by private citizens and 10 per cent by journalists. But it is interesting to note that 26,083 were not granted.

There is no doubt that some journalists use FoI to mount fishing expeditions when they have no story. One example troubling ministers is a health authority being asked about every reconfiguration considered since 1997. But hard cases make bad law. The £10 million that the Government expects to save by discouraging such requests are utterly dwarfed by the scale of public spending waste that FoI helps to expose. By far the greatest cost to government is the cost of appeals, which will rise dramatically if the regulations go ahead. Cost is clearly not the real issue.

In 1996 a man called Tony Blair gave a typically passionate speech. “Information is power,” he said, “and any government’s attitude about sharing information with the people actually says a great deal about how it views power itself and how it views the relationship between itself and the people who elected it.”

QED, Mr Blair. Do not be surprised if that is precisely how we judge you. And find you wanting.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone