Politicians find it easy to talk of open government in opposition, but it goes against the grain when they are in power. That is why the Freedom of Information Act, which came into effect in 2005, was such a rare and courageous piece of legislation. It has started to open doors to citizens who pay taxes and who rightly expect to hold their representatives to account. But less than two years into its life, ministers seem to have taken fright. The Government is seeking to make changes to the Act which are ostensibly about saving money but which will have the effect of making it much easier for ministers to save face by dodging difficult questions.

Currently, public bodies and government departments can refuse requests under the Act if the information would cost them £450 or £600 respectively to collate. Only the cost of tracking down the files and retrieving the data is included in that cost, at a notional £25 an hour. But the Lord Chancellor wants a new charging regime, which would include the time spent by ministers and officials deciding whether to release the information requested. That would effectively give every official carte blanche to play for time and to refuse any request that might prove embarrassing. Lord Falconer would also like the cost cap to apply across all requests made by one individual or organisation in a particular time-period. But it would be absurd to stop large media groups from making requests commensurate with their size.

The Government’s plea is that it is overwhelmed, and that 5 per cent of all requests generate 45 per cent of the work. There is no doubt that some requests are purely mischief-making, and it is probably true that others could be better focused. But many are using the Act precisely as it was intended, to tilt the balance of power back towards the citizen. As we report today, the Information Commisioner is expected to emphasise this week that the Act already allows public bodies wide-ranging powers to dismiss vexatious requests. The law ain’t broke; there is no need to fix it. The savings that the Lord Chancellor expects to make – up to £10 million – are small change for government and minuscule compared with the amount of waste in public spending that FoI has already helped to expose.

It is clear that cost is not the real issue. But one reason that some requests have proved so time-consuming is that ministers have become more involved than was anticipated. An economic analysis commissioned by the Department for Constitutional Affairs recently found that as many as one in five requests was being personally considered by ministers. It is clearly up to ministers how carefully they monitor requests. But that must not become an excuse for curtailing the rights of citizens to hold them to account.

The tone of some media comment on this issue may make it sound as though the industry is beating the drum for itself. But 60 per cent of all requests made so far under Freedom of Information have come from private citizens. Some of these — mothers obtaining secret reports on their local school, staff exposing abuse in care homes — have vastly improved local lives.

There could be no better indication of just how the secrecy culture is embedded in Whitehall than the spectacle of the Attorney General, at the behest of the police, attempting to ban the media not only from reporting new revelations in the cash-for-honours inquiry, but reporting the existence of the ban. Whitehall prefers to operate in the dark; but citizens deserve daylight.