The Reading of the 30,000

There is some irony in the quite extraordinary news that the Independent Commission on Freedom of Information received 30,000 submissions in response to its public call for written evidence: one of the considerations in the call for evidence was the fact that “reading time” cannot currently be factored in as one of the tasks which determines whether a request exceeds the cost limit under section 12 of the FOI Act. 

Lord Burns has now announced that

Given the large volume of evidence that we have received, it will take time to read and consider all of the submissions

Well, yes. The Commission originally planned to report its findings “before the end of the year” (that is, the parliamentary year, which ends on 17 December). It also planned to read all the evidence which was before the Justice Committee when it conducted its post-legislative scrutiny of FOIA in 2012, and there was a fair amount of that. But let us put that to one side, and let us estimate that reading and where necessary taking a note of each of the current 30,000 submissions will take someone ten minutes (as some submissions were 400 pages long, this is perhaps a ridiculously conservative estimate). That equates to 300,000 minutes, or 5000 hours, or 208 days of one person’s time (assuming they never slept or took a break: if we imagine that they spent eight hours reading every day, it would be 625 days).

I don’t know what sort of administrative support Lord Burns and his fellow Commission members have been given, but, really, to do their job properly one would expect them to read the submissions themselves. There are five of them, so even assuming they shared the reading between them, we might expect they would between them take 125 days (without a break, and with little or no time to undertake their other jobs and responsibilities) to digest the written evidence.

Lord Burns has sensibly conceded that the Commission will not be able to report by the end of the year, and he has announced that two oral evidence sessions will take place in January next year (although who will participate has not been announced, nor whether the sessions will be broadcast, nor even whether they will take place in public).

What is clear though is that someone or ones has a heck of a job ahead of them. I doubt that the Commission, as an advisory non-departmental public body, would be amenable to judicial review, so it is probably not strictly bound by public law duties to take all relevant evidence into account when arriving at its decisions and recommendations, but, nonetheless, a failure so to do would open it up to great, and justified, criticism.

And, one final point, as Ian Clark noticed when submitting his evidence, the web form was predicated on the assumption that those making submissions would only be from an “organisation”. Surely the Commission didn’t assume that the only people with views on the matter were those who received FOI requests? Surely they didn’t forget that, ultimately, FOIA is for the public?

The views in this post (and indeed all posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.