Few ministers should have a keener understanding of the political cost of attempting to suppress information than Gordon Brown. For two years the Treasury delayed and obstructed the request from this newspaper for information detailing the warnings given by its officials to the Chancellor then over the effect on pensions of his proposal to abolish dividend tax credits in 1997. Mr Brown relented only when he realised that Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, was unlikely to side with the Treasury. And despite strenuous Whitehall attempts to bury the bad news amid the Iranian hostage crisis and on a day when Parliament was not sitting, the resulting uproar was a serious setback to Mr Brown’s reputation and prime ministerial hopes.

It is all the more heartening, therefore, that the Prime Minister has now taken the bold decision not only to scrap proposals to tighten the charging regime for freedom of information requests but to bolster Labour’s landmark legislation with new measures intended to reinforce government transparency. He and Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, yesterday outlined measures to give Parliament more say in sending British Forces to war, to review the way that personal information is shared and protected in the private and public sectors and to ensure that nothing in the new Criminal Justice Bill will “impede legitimate investigative journalism”.

All this is a welcome recommitment to the principle of open government that was epitomised in the Freedom of Information Act, intended to end Whitehall’s entrenched culture of secrecy. But within months of the Act taking effect in 2005, ministers had already begun to retreat from its promises. The Lord Chancellor proposed this year a new charging regime that would include the time spent by ministers and officials deciding whether to release the information requested. This would have effectively given every official carte blanche to play for time and to refuse any request that might prove embarrassing. The Government also proposed to penalise “vexatious” and time-wasting requests for information, arguing that 5 per cent of the total generated 45 per cent of the work.

Clearly it was not the cost but the embarrassment of disclosure that was causing cold feet. But that was indeed the point of inquiries by the press and ordinary individuals – not to tie the Government in knots but to bring out into the open abuses that would not be remedied unless they were disclosed. The list of issues that this newspaper alone has taken up as a result of information forced from a reluctant bureaucracy is impressive: the scandal of peers giving lobbyists passes to Parliament intended for secretaries; the cost of health tourism; the underpayment of £1 billion to around 500,000 women pensioners; the economic and political misjudgments behind the Black Wednesday disaster; and the revelation that Tony Blair spent more than £130,000 of public money on a string of family holidays.

To its credit, this Government has decided that such embarrassments are the price that any administration must pay for an open society and a free press. The promises of new transparency, part of the constitutional changes that Mr Straw is championing, must be monitored to ensure that they are kept. What better way than using a press free to ask for and obtain the information to do its job?