Former Oxford Lord Mayor John Power said the Freedom of Information Act had allowed the machine of government to be opened up - and for scandals to be made public.

And two major stories stick in his memory.

The first was when it emerged no official minutes were taken during a top-level meeting to discuss Oxford's waste collection and recycling arrangements.

On the day the scheme was launched in November last year, members of the city council's environmental health and cleansing departments met to thrash out solutions to potential problems.

Issues like the storage of bins at flats and bedsits, residents using the wrong recycling receptacles and how to enforce them were discussed, but no official record was taken.

Mr Power said: "I managed to establish the city council had not carried out proper procedures in implementing the scheme.

"And when they had meetings between the departments they didn't take minutes, which showed an astonishing lack of coordination."

The second request revealed the number of staff employed by Oxfordshire County Council had gone up by almost a third over the past decade (see Page 4).

Mr Power said: "At a time when they are charging me £40 to park my car (for an on-street parking permit), here we have a mass increase in staff numbers and a dramatic reduction in service.

"They may be an excellent council, but they are an excellently expensive council with too many staff, doing too little, being paid too much.

"No wonder they need to charge for parking if they are employing that many staff.

"It has been extremely interesting to me and the people of Oxford - and without Freedom of Information nobody would have known about this.

"Freedom of Information has allowed the public to open up the machine to see how it works.

"Local authorities are not spending their money, they are spending other people's money, so the sky's the limit."

Former Blackbird Leys Parish Council chairman Brian Lester added: "The councils have been put on the back foot a couple of times - and I believe Freedom of Information should mean just that, unless it is to the detriment of national security.

"What MPs get paid and their travelling expenses should be public knowledge - it's the same for county and city councillors."

County council leader Keith Mitchell said: "The principle of Freedom of Information is a good one and presents me with no difficulty.

"The cost of extracting information to such FoI requests is in danger of far exceeding any value to the community - but that is the price of democracy."