David Burt has said hiring extra staff to ease the burden on public officers tasked with responding to Public Access to Information requests is off the table.

The Premier also denied that information gained by Pati use had been damaging to the reputation of the Government, maintaining that new amendments are for the purpose of addressing staff resource issues.

The Public Access to Information Amendment Bill enables the Government to charge $60 per hour for any requests that exceed 16 hours to research and compile, while requests that take more than 100 hours to complete can be rejected.

Mr Burt told The Royal Gazette: “We cannot place Pati officers in every single government department, that is just not realistic. So we’ll start there.

“Number two, these are public officers that are doing this work on a daily basis. What happens is that they are distracted from their existing work.

“The reasonable limits which have been set out allow for requests to happen, for persons to respond on those particular reasonable limits and for persons who have the option of refining their request to a more narrow scope or something broader.”

Asked whether information that had been unearthed since the enactment of the principal Act in 2010 had shed a bad light on the Government, Mr Burt responded: “I don't think that Pati’s been damaging.

“Remember Pati was put into law by the Progressive Labour Party. Yes, it was brought into effect by the One Bermuda Alliance. It was passed.

“I do not believe that Pati is a bad thing. I believe that citizens should have the right to request information from the Government but in all things, we have to recognise how things are working, and the challenges that are there.”

Pati has helped The Royal Gazette to uncover numerous stories about the Government including the special report on gaming and casino gaming secrets the authorities did not want the public to know.

It was Pati that helped to uncover the cost of sending at-risk children in care abroad and revelations that they had no legal representation before being sent overseas.

Mr Burt denied that the Bill removes scrutiny, saying the Government intends to make its information more accessible with the help of technological advancements.

“I think that what the Government would like to do, and what I have asked the ministries to start to prepare for through digital transformation, is to find out how we can expose more and more information from government and put it inside the public domain.

“We have had significant under investment in technical infrastructure and in physical infrastructure since the financial crisis.

“I think that it is reasonable to expect that we'll be able, through digital transformation and investment in digital technology, to expose more and more of that information.

“So I can accept that certain persons may feel that particular criticism, but from a government's perspective, we need to try to balance the challenges.”

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