TODAY the government's much vaunted Freedom of Information Bill begins its committee stage in the House of Lords.

Blackburn MP and Home Secretary Jack Straw has described the bill as "a radical and reforming piece of legislation" but it has been attacked for not going nearly far enough.Businesswomen Anita Roddick OBE, founder and co-chairman of The Body Shop, thinks the bill is "woefully inadequate, undemocratic and potentially dangerous." Here she explains why:

I'VE seen for myself the effect that the worst kind of international business can have on people's lives.

And when you do see the truth, it can change the way you see everything. I've held mutated babies genetically handicapped by toxic wastes dumped in local streams. I've spied on illegal loggers in Sarawak, Malaysia. I've seen babies born near Mexican tobacco fields born without genitalia because of the chemicals. It changed my life.

But the hard fact of the matter is that most of us can't see for ourselves. We rely on the media, on product labelling, on codes of business conduct and corporate openness to know what lies behind the products we buy, the food we eat, just as we rely on the press to keep our rulers on the straight and narrow.

That's why freedom of information -- the subject of the long-awaited and very disappointing Bill now before Parliament -- is so important in the modern world, and why it's also now absolutely vital for good business.

Freedom of information is about democracy, of course. But it is also about good decision-making, in the sense of both efficiency and ethics.

Anyone who doubts the sheer incompetence of closed government has only to read Antony Beevor's recent best-seller Stalingrad. There you'll find a terrifying account of two closed, totalitarian regimes and their accidents, failures, inefficiencies and happy sacrifice of their own people -- all because nobody dared challenge the secretive coterie of decision-makers at the top.

In the same way that government without freedom of information means bad short-term decisions, business without freedom of information is also dangerously inefficient. It means corners get cut, safety gets compromised, mistakes get covered up.

But globalisation makes the whole issue urgent for business, because without government regulation or free information, business takes place in a dark world where all we are allowed to know about companies is the price of their product. All too often that results in sweat shops for workers. All too often, secretive business can become criminal. That's one reason why, at The Body Shop, we have been fighting an attempt by the European Commission to outlaw the 'cruelty-free' labelling to our products. And it is also why we simply must persuade our legislators to put some guts into the inadequate Freedom of Information Bill.

The problem is that the areas of exemption are still far too broad. Information about safety problems on the railways, in consumer products and the nuclear industry are exempt from the new bill. Nor does it over-ride the current statutory restrictions that prevent information getting out about animal experimentation and medicine safety. Even routine safety inspections would be exempt. All information relating to policy, including the facts behind the decisions, could still be held back.

Under our proposed new law, ministers can veto any disclosure on the vague grounds of that in the "reasonable opinion of a qualified person ... it would be likely to prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs".

According to Home Office minister Mike O'Brien, this is because they know best. "The government consider that only a qualified person can have a full understanding of the issues involved in the decision-making processes of a public authority ... we do not consider that it would be right for the prejudice caused by that sort of information to be determined by the Commissioner."

It's "neo-fascist garbage," according to the respected political commentator Hugo Young. It's also the authentic voice of an accident-prone officialdom throughout history, and through the generations it has condemned the rest of us to mistakes, inefficiency and accidents.

It's particularly sad when the New Labour promised so much. In fact, they promised a Freedom of Information Act with teeth not just in their last manifesto, but in every Labour election manifesto since 1974.

None of this implies that the Bill is all bad. It applies to nearly all public bodies and public companies and it will apply retrospectively. The trouble is the exemptions are far too broad: We still require a modern Freedom of Information Act, like most of the Western world, and one that can make us proud of our system of government again. Freedom of information isn't just democratic, it's modern and it's efficient.

It's hard to understand why the government -- so 'modern' in other areas -- hasn't yet grasped that.

The sad fact is that their current Freedom of Information Bill favours bad government over efficient government, and it protects bad, corrupt and dangerous business over good business.

Let's hope our legislators can fashion a better one.