For concerned citizens of every stripe, 2005 should, on paper, have been a brave new dawn after a long night of waiting. The catalyst was to have been the Freedom of Information Act, promised by new Labour seven years ago, requiring 100,000 public bodies to divulge whatever information petitioners requested unless there was a compelling legal reason to withold it. Homeowners would at last get straight answers to questions about new bypasses and runways. Parents would know exactly what their children were being fed at school, and who supplied it. Victims of petty crime would be entitled to chapter and verse on the police response — not just to their own break-in, but to others in their neighbourhood. Building contractors and IT firms would be able to find out how their rivals beat them to lucrative local authority contracts, by reading the e-mails behind the deals.

The Act, in short, was not meant merely for investigative journalists and academics. It was — and is — intended to empower the public at large to call government at every level to account, and to give government a chance to earn back lost public confidence. The aim is noble and the legislation vital, but after nine months in operation its enforcement is already in danger of grinding to a halt. As we report today, three quarters of the appeals lodged since January against refusals to provide information remain unresolved, with staff at the Information Commissioner’s office admitting that all they can do for impatient complainants is apologise.

There are structural reasons for the backlog that can be easily addressed. An increasing proportion of appeals comes from businesses seeking information for purely commercial reasons. These were anticipated; the resources so far earmarked to handle them are simply inadequate. At the same time, Richard Thomas, the commissioner, is having to cope with private appeals triggered by a surge of requests that peaked earlier this year but is now receding.

Mr Thomas’s most serious challenge by far is not logistical, but cultural. Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the Constitutional Affairs Secretary, has called the Act “a bold and determined response to generations of secrecy” — and no one seriously expected that secrecy would evaporate overnight. What is alarming, though hardly surprising to sceptics, is the speed with which the instinct to resist disclosure has embedded itself in the apparatus of enforcement. The Orwellian-sounding Central Clearing House, which handles information requests containing “trigger” words such as “Prime Minister” and “diaries”, has assumed the de facto role of blocking the release of information. In an extraordinary lapse, it has even put this role in writing in a memo stating that the stock answer to supposedly sensitive requests should be “withhold”.

If Britain were famous for bureaucratic openness this might be wise advice. But, even now, the opposite is true: the new Act is strikingly unambitious by European and, especially, US, standards. Mr Thomas, and the Information Tribunal that serves as the last court of appeal in matters of the Act, must issue some boldly liberal judgments. These would have the force of legal precedent and might switch more junior civil servants’ default answer to information requests from “no ” to “probably”. This Act is not a mere suggestion. It is the law.