Two People can keep a secret if one of them is dead...

Famous words there by Benjamin Franklin and more true today than ever before. In today's social savvy world, the important of secrets before, during and after the incident has never been more important.  This is even more important with government (Central, Regional, and Local) and sometimes they do need to suppress thing from the public in general. Now as stated before, government secrets are an anathema to democracy, so it is interesting why government need to have a secrecy agreement with employees or others.

So when a local council in Wales wants someone to keep something secret they use something called a suppression order.  This is very different very the Official secrets act in the fact that the official secrets act allows for a criminal prosecution; suppression orders simply stop you talking about a topic and you can be fined for speaking about it.  So why use them in the first place.  If I could give examples, then I would but then I would know what the suppression orders were suppressing and therefore null the whole point.

So I asked all Welsh Councils (And the Welsh Assembly) how many gagging orders they have imposed and how many people are still working in the said council under the gagging order.  Then I got a nice little email back from all of them saying that they don't do gagging orders and that they do suppression orders. So the FoI request was changed to suppression orders (with a slight amount of humble pie being eaten).  The results are thus:

Name	Order\ suppression orders
Blaenau	No Answer
Bridgend	0
Caerphilly	0
Cardiff	No Answer
Carmarthenshire	0
Ceredigion	No Answer
Conway	0
Denbighshire	0
Flintshire	0
Gwynedd	Unable
Anglesey	0
Merthyr Tydfil	0
Monmouth	Less than 5
Neath Port Talbot	25
Newport	0
Pembroke	No Answer
Powys	99
RCT	No Answer
Swansea	No Answer

Torfaen	8
Vale Of Glamorgan	11
Wrexham	30

I did asked the Welsh Government and the Assembly of Wales but I either lost the email or deleted it by accident.  As an aside, the answer I got from most council is that a suppression order is usually used on someone when they leave a job, so the answer to my question how many are still working is nil.

This posts an interesting picture of Powys, doesn't it? 99 orders…  What are they hiding up there?  It also makes you think how many Cardiff and Swansea have.  I mean they are by far bigger councils than Powys.  Potentially they should have more suppression orders, but only follow ups are going to help that out

So the next question is what are they hiding from us…  Maybe they’ll tell us, maybe it will be released.  The thing is, however, there could be nothing to this, the secret is more interesting that the facts it hides…  Who knows...