As any fule kno, a public authority has to comply with a Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) request within 20 working days. Where the authority fails to do so, the requester can ask the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to issue a decision notice.
And so, here we have a newly published decision where the ICO is telling itself that it has overshot the twenty working day limit by almost seven months:
“it is clear that, in failing to issue a full response to this request within 20 working days, the ICO has breached section 10 of the FOIA.”
Unsurprisingly, the ICO doesn’t appear to be taking enforcement action against itself. Surprisingly, though, there seems to be no indication in the notice itself that this is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily poor, state of affairs.
I’d like to imagine this is single aberration, but it isn’t. On 12 March this year I also made a FOIA request to ICO, and I am still to get a (complete) answer. And only a couple of months ago ICO again had to rule against itself, after it took six months to respond to a request.
informationrightsandwrongs 