When I managed a team who's duties included FOI-request response, I often had a
battle arguing that many of the requests could be answered outside the act -
with a simple reply.
My previous points about misunderstanding the act are on both sides - many
inquirers misunderstand the scope ("please explain why you are doing this"),
and many authorities over-complicate the process of response.
On 19 Jan 2012, at 08:53, Seb Bacon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just resurrecting this old discussion briefly as I had a mini query:
>
> Surely councils, quangos and government departments already had to
> deal with vexatious requests *before* FOI? Even if you define "deal
> with" as "have a quick scan and throw in the bin", it's still going to
> cost you some amount of money. Has anyone done some research to
> compare the two? E.g. how much time / money was spent on answering
> questions about UFOs before FOIA? What *extra* costs has the FOIA
> introduced for dealing with such requests?
>
> Seb
>
> On 21 December 2011 12:33, Mark Goodge <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 21/12/2011 11:31, Seb Bacon wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Tom is absolutely right that the starting gun has been fired. There
>>> have already been a couple of stories along the line that Cabinet
>>> debates should not be subject to FOI [1], and the
>>> not-entirely-relevant-but-overlapping idea that the DPA should be
>>> revoked [2]. At the same time, the outgoing Scottish ICO commissioned
>>> research showing strong public support for FOI [3]
>>
>>
>> I think the concerns raised in the stories reported in the first two links
>> are real, and need to be addressed. Personally, I wouldn't have a problem
>> with excluding Cabinet minutes from FOI, at least in principle. In practice,
>> though, I'd be very wary of anything which might be seen as the thin end of
>> the wedge - if we accept the removal of one thing, what's to stop the
>> removal of another? So I'd only accept such a change along with a broader
>> review of FOI that not only excludes some things that it may have been wrong
>> to include but also includes some things that were previously excluded.
>>
>>
>>> I read the general thrust of the report as "FOI is a great success,
>>> but probably costs too much money" (see para 221 in the Conclusion
>>> section, for example).
>>>
>>> There is a lot of space dedicated to how much requests cost (a total
>>> of 900,000 requests at an average cost of £160 - £254), to how
>>> authorities view the costs as being too high (e.g. opportunity costs
>>> of staff having to deal with requests other than their day jobs), and
>>> to the subject of vexatious requests.
>>
>>
>> I think there are two separate points to be made about costs. Firstly, a lot
>> of costs would be minimised, or even eliminated, if the sort of information
>> likely to be requested via FOI was pre-emptively published by the
>> authorities themselves rather than waiting to be asked for it. Obviously
>> that isn't going to apply to every possible request, since you can't predict
>> every question that will be asked, but simple things like making sure that
>> budget documents, etc can readily be found on the relevant website would
>> help a lot.
>>
>> But, on the other hand, with my councillor hat on, I do think that the
>> cut-off is possibly too high for some authorities. £600 is peanuts for a
>> central government department, but £450 is a significant sum to a local
>> council which needs to account for it in their annual precept-setting budget
>> meeting. But I'm not entirely sure what the solution is, since reducing the
>> limit might make it unduly difficult to obtain some information.
>>
>>
>>> On the one hand, the WDTK team is committed to discouraging any
>>> non-serious requests. And in the context of severe budget cuts, it's
>>> clear that consicentious FOI officers are suffering [4]. Perhaps one
>>> thing we can do is add a note during the request process about the
>>> average cost of an FOI request (and/or an internal review)? Just
>>> along the lines of "please consider if this request is important
>>> enough to justify the average cost of answering it" (though worded
>>> much better than that, of course!).
>>
>>
>> Vexatious, frivolous and misguided requests are a real issue. I'm not quite
>> sure how to stop people sending them, though, without it looking like
>> censorship.
>>
>>
>> Mark
>> --
>> Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine 2
>> http://mark.goodge.co.uk
>>
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>
>
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