A journalist who won a three-year secrecy battle with a council has shared his hope the decision will help local reporters in the future.

Thurrock Council has been ordered to reveal exactly how it borrowed and invested £1bn of taxpayers’ money after a Freedom of Information fight by Gareth Davies, who works for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s The Bureau Local project.

The Tory-run council, whose leader Rob Gledhill resigned over the issue last month, refused Gareth’s FoI requests to make details of deals worth hundreds of millions of pounds public.

Gareth, pictured, previously revealed Thurrock had borrowed £1bn from other local authorities and then invested hundreds of millions of pounds in a “complex and potentially risky” series of bonds connected to solar farms.

Now a tribunal has ruled there is a “powerful public interest in public authorities being open about their activities and accountable for them”, and suggested the council had withheld information from the public eye in order to avoid embarrassment.

The judge-led information rights tribunal said Thurrock’s dealings should be disclosed due to their “wholly exceptional scale” and that the objection put forward by Sean Clark, the finance director who arranged the deals, “bordered on the absurd”. Thurrock now has until 28 November to disclose the information.

Gareth, a former chief reporter at the Croydon Advertiser, told HTFP: “The information we requested in 2019 will provide vital insight into disastrous investments which threaten to cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds and to cripple a council that provides vital services to local people.

“It should never have taken three years to reach this point.

“The tribunal suggests why it did – not because the council wanted to protect its business interests but to avoid the embarrassment that would come from those deals being scrutinised.

“Hopefully this ruling will have wider positive implications for the transparency of public spending.

“At the very least, journalists trying to scrutinise their local councils using the Freedom of Information Act now have another compelling example to call on when arguing that the balance of the public interest is in disclosure.”

Mark Coxshall, the council’s new leader, has promised “a new era of openness, transparency and honesty” since his election to the role, while a spokesperson for the authority said it was considering the tribunal’s decision and would provide a further response once it had been fully reviewed.