Free information is not always convenient information. Last Friday, The Times secured the release of official papers relating to the decision to abolish dividend tax credits in 1997. This data had first been requested two years ago and the Treasury sought until the last to prevent publication. Only when it became clear that the Information Commissioner would side with the right to know did Gordon Brown’s officials relent. Even then, they did so on a day when Parliament was not sitting and with the Iranian hostage crisis distracting attention. These were documents that the Chancellor wanted to stay secret.

They show that Mr Brown was warned of substantial risks if he went ahead with this initiative, especially if he insisted on the “big bang” approach of scrapping the credits outright on Budget day, as he chose to do, not phasing the credits out over four years. Ed Balls, the Chancellor’s key adviser then and now Economic Secretary to the Treasury, has insisted that these papers have been wilfully misinterpreted. He asserted at the weekend that Mr Brown had just followed the “best advice” of his civil servants and to imply otherwise is “abject nonsense”. Mr Balls doth protest too much.

What this information actually indicates is a division of emphasis within the Treasury. Much of the Inland Revenue plainly had little enthusiasm for the provision of tax relief on pension funds. The savings and investment division informed the Chancellor that surpluses held by pensions companies were “looking healthier than we have assumed” and could be as much as £60 billion in total. These funds meant that the industry would be “substantially cushioned” from the change. These officials took the view that “1 per cent to 5 per cent of pension fund investment would be affected”.So while the industry would issue dire predictions of what might occur if tax credits were scrapped, “we do not believe that these claims are realistic”.

The financial institutions division, on the other hand, was much more cautious. Being more familiar with this sector it cautioned that estimates of its surpluses were difficult. These officials were far less confident that pensions schemes could absorb this blow without some pain. They could envisage a “big hole” in their funding emerging, astutely observing that future benefits could be reduced and that those on low incomes would be worst affected.Mr Brown is entitled to argue that the balance of the assessments that he received were sympathetic to his preferred reform, that the worries about an instant dive in share prices were misplaced and that there are several factors, notably the dot-com crash, which best explain what has happened to pensions in the past decade. What neither he nor Mr Balls can legitimately claim is that they were not alerted to serious risks. Even the bullish part of the Inland Revenue acknowledged that if share prices “fell generally as a result of the market correction anticipated by some commentators”, then much more severe problems “could be triggered” by discarding dividend tax credits.

Britain is still in the infancy of the freedom of information era (which would be short if ministers have their way). Disclosures of this sort should become commonplace. The best and most candid response of politicians would be to note that they have to make decisions on the basis of complex, often competing, counsel. They should not resort to the abject nonsense of pretending that contradictory advice did not exist.