Tag Archives: FOI

February 10, 2012 · 2:30 pm

Transparent as mud

Our Prime Minister is committed to transparency in government. In June 2010 he set up a Public Sector Transparency Board containing some of the great and good in the field of open data and transparency: you’d struggle to pick better people than Tom Steinberg, Nigel Shadbolt, Rufus Pollock and Tim Berners-Lee (I’m not hyperlinking him – if you don’t know who he is then find out who invented hyperlinks). The Board is chaired by Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, who has written – at the same time as he was lambasting Tony Blair’s dispiriting comments on freedom of information –  that

If I ever sit down to write my own memoirs, freeing up government information will not number amongst my regrets. In fact, I very much hope that it will be one of my very proudest achievements.

Mr Cameron seems to feel the same way:

In the years to come, people will look back at the days when government kept all its data – your data – in vaults and think how strange it was that the taxpayers – the people who actually own all this – were locked out.

Now, it so happens that there has been, in recent months, much debate about whether – or rather, to what extent – private emails written by those connected with the Department for Education are “caught” by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).  (Read the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum and the Financial Times’ Chris Cook on this, I insist). The Information Commissioner has been very clear that his view is that information concerning official business held in private email accounts is subject to FOIA (he’s right, by the way) but Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, told the House of Commons Education Select Committee that

The advice that we had received from the Cabinet Office was that anything that was held on private email accounts was not subject to Freedom of Information requests.

So, when, Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan, tabled a question in parliament on 6 February asking if the Cabinet Office would publish

guidance on private emails and the Freedom of Information Act referred to in the Education Select Committee evidence session of 31 January 2012 as having been issued to the Department for Education.

It was, let’s say, not very encouraging for those of us who support the “transparency agenda” (as it seems it must be called) that she received the following response

Information relating to internal discussion and advice is not normally disclosed

Yep. That’s right – internal information about how a goverment department handles requests under FOIA, is not to be disclosed.

It might be thought odd, or interesting, or both, that the minister who replied to Ms Nandy was Francis Maude, MP. I’ll leave you to write your own jokes.

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November 17, 2011 · 9:10 am

Tweets and Tw*ts

A few days ago I tweeted @ICONews, the twitter account of the Information Commissioner (IC)

@ICONews any chance you can disclose (waive privilege?) legal advice/analysis of Letwin case? Important re: manual data/Cat E data #DPA

The context of this was that there had been some discussions in data protection circles, following the revelations about Oliver Letwin and his dumping of correspondence in the bins of St Jame’ss Park, about whether in strict terms there would have been a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) (on this see similar questions raised by Stewart Room about Vince Cable’s recent incident).

The undertaking signed by Letwin didn’t make clear exactly how the IC had arrived at a decision that there had been a breach of the DPA, and I was keen to know more. So was fellow tweeter @tim2040 who asked me

@bainesy1969 Are you going to #FOI them or am I? Or did your tweet to them count?

When I sent my first tweet I hadn’t thought of it as a request made under Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). However, knowing that a public authority must treat a request for information even if the requester does not “mention the Freedom of Information Act…although it may help to do so” I realised that I had rather inadvertently made a formal request which the IC’s office had to respond to, in accordance with Part 1 of FOIA. I also know that it’s easy sometimes for a public authority to miss that a valid FOIA request has been made. So, in a spirit of helpfulness, I clarified:

@ICONews Just to confirm, this earlier tweet to you was request for information #FOI http://t.co/gUeqdwGg

I’ve now received a reply from @ICONews, which says

@bainesy1969 In line with our guidance please could you provide a postal or email address for further correspondence.

Now, I really don’t want to come across as a twit (what else did you think the asterisked word was in this post title?) but I know what their guidance says (it’s my job to know it)

The request must state the name of the applicant…A Twitter name may not be the requester’s real name, but the real name may be shown in their linked profile

as mine is

The request must also state an address ‘for correspondence’. Does this include Twitter names? The length of a tweet makes it difficult for the authority to respond fully, but there are ways of dealing with this. The authority could ask the requester for an email address in order to provide a full response. Alternatively, it could publish the requested information, or a refusal notice, on its website and tweet a link to that.

So I’ve gone back to them saying

@ICONews My name’s in my profile. In line with yr guidance cd you not publish info or refusal notice on yr site and tweet link to it?

A bit twattish twittish, I accept, and I’ll be extending an olive branch to the IC’s office by contacting them privately to give them my email address. However, it does raise interesting questions about the extent to which one has to put a request for information in “formal” terms for it to be recognised. I don’t know if the IC’s office would have recognised my original tweet as a request for information – maybe they would. But, as I say, I wasn’t thinking of FOIA when I made it – I was rather hoping that someone at the office would see it and think “Hey – it would be a good idea for us to publish a note explaining how we arrived at our findings in the Letwin case”.

I know of an incident where the press office at a Council received an enquiry from a local journalist. He and the press office were well-acquainted and on generally good terms. He asked for information about a council employee and an alleged criminal offence, and he was given an “unable to comment” response. He queried this and was told (correctly) that it was for data protection reasons. He, knowing something of the regulatory process, then complained to the IC. The problem was that the press office had followed their normal press enquiry prcoedures and consequently not issued a formal refusal notice under section 17 of FOIA. The IC, if he had been asked to issue a decision notice, could not have avoided a determination that there had been a breach of FOIA. However, I would suggest neither the local media nor the Council’s press office could effectively function if every enquiry by a time-pressed local hack was dealt with as a formal FOIA request (with a 20 working day deadline).

I’m not sure there is an easy answer to this, and perhaps there will always be a grey area  separating “general correspondence” from “FOI request”. However, public authorities who have a twitter account must be aware of the possibility (probability?) that they will receive requests for information, and that sometimes these won’t be clearly labelled as FOI requests. I would hope that, in the event that these end up as complaints to his office, the IC would show some understanding of the difficulties of applying the formal mechanisms of FOIA to circumstances which might warrant a less formal approach (as in fact he did in the press office case in the preceding paragraph) .

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November 9, 2011 · 8:51 am

Biting the Hand that Feeds – a Risky Business?

Bloggers in the fields of UK Information Rights can sometimes be critical of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) (we can?). But that’s really because we love the IC and his people. Or, at least, we strongly support the existence of the office, and the principle functions it carries out. There may be disagreements on the decisions and actions taken, but many frustrations are caused by the restrictions on his powers, or as a result of the limited funding he gets.

I noticed earlier this week that Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, had told parliament that his Department’s shocking record on compliance with Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) timescales (in the last quarter only 48% of response met the 20-working-day deadline) was in part as a result of the fact that

The Cabinet Office deals with FoI requests in relation to cabinet papers under the last government which takes some time to be dealt with because we need to consult with ministers in the last government.

As I suggested on twitter, it would be nice if we all could blame our predecessors for our heavy workload (I for one still can’t forgive Rupert Baxter for handing over that tricky planning file to me in 2002) but this really is not good enough as an excuse.

In the same period in which the Cabinet Office achieved 48% compliance, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) achieved a still very poor 75% (by contrast the Department of Health achieved 99%, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport 96% and the Department for Work and Pensions 93% – all these figures are from the MoJ’s own quarterly stats) The MoJ is the sole provider, by means of grant in aid, of funding for the IC’s Freedom of Information work (the IC also receives approximately £15 million from the notification fee that data controllers pay to operate under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), but this is ring-fenced for DPA work). This FOI grant amounted last year to approximately £5.5 million. However, that grant is at risk of reduction, and the IC is concerned about that. His risk register has recently been disclosed and this shows as a “red risk” a “gap between FOI resources and incoming casework affects FOI and DP casework…” and it is clear that this risk potentially leads on to others, such as the “ICO reputation suffers because some of the risks facing the ICO materialise…”. None of this is real news, of course. Christopher Graham himself told the Home Affairs Select Committee

Like all public authorities, we are having to take our slice of the cuts. We are responding to that constructively, trying to achieve better for less. But the fact is that if we are asked to do more and more under the transparency and accountability agenda, we will need the resources to do it.

Now consider this: the IC is under a statutory duty to operate so as to ensure the observance by public authorities of their requirements under FOIA. One means by which he does this is to monitor authorities which repeatedly or seriously fail to respond to freedom of information requests within the appropriate timescales. This monitoring can be a precursor to further action, and the Cabinet Office was subject to such further action when it signed an undertaking with the IC in June this year to improve its performance.
The IC says that he is likely to monitor authorities if, among other criteria, “(for those authorities which publish data on timeliness) it appears that less than 85% of requests are receiving a response within the appropriate timescales”. Well, as we have seen, it certainly appears, from the published data, that less than 85% of requests to the MoJ are receiving a response within the appropriate timescales. Interestingly, in the previous quarter the figure was 83%, the quarter before that 87% and the quarter before that 88%. A downward trend like that is arguably further evidence of a need for monitoring, and it would be interesting to know if the IC takes this into account, or whether, perhaps, he takes an annual average from those quarterly stats.
So a simple question arises – when the next group of authorities whose compliance is begin monitored is announced, will it include the MoJ? Will the IC risk biting the hand that feeds him?

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