Stephen, hello. On 2012 Mar 19, at 13:28, Stephen Booth wrote:
> On 19 March 2012 12:49, Norman Gray <[email protected]> wrote: >> The BBC's motto is something along the lines of "to educate, inform, and >> entertain". It doesn't usually do the latter bespoke. >> > > I was going for the 'inform' part, maybe some 'educate' as well. If > you read my note to them on 6th May, following their response, you > will see I described their response as 'interesting and useful', not > 'entertaining and fun'. You will note from their response that > fulfilling this request allowed them to discover that one of their > offices was breaking the law and rectify the situation before TV > Licensing (which is run by a private company profiting from the public > purse) and drag them to court. But this snippet of information doesn't educate or inform -- as far as I can see it's a perfectly useless bit of information. Businesses are not going to trawl FoI requests for advice on keeping their TV licences up to date; and the BBC is not being usefully alerted to a licence being missing from one of its premises -- that would be routinely caught by whatever branch of the TV Licensing operation deals with commercial premises, and the omission is a trivial (but slightly comical) goof by whichever Building Manager is responsible for the office in question. Paul Perrin said: > They should have had such information to hand. > > Do you think they are so slipshod on keeping their buildings insurance up > to date? No, they should not have had this information to hand. Creating the database tables to manage this sort of information is expensive, and creating the processes to keep that information up to date would cause an expensive bureaucratic explosion, which would be a gross waste of money. I do not imagine that the central offices of any large commercial operation could put their hands on scattered TV licence information either (they're not daft). Why does this matter? It matters because... (Stephen:) > The FoI is there to allow us to query the bodies that spend our money > and act on our behalf. The FoI Act is a very important bit of legislation. It deletes "because we don't want to" as an acceptable response by a public body to a request for information, and asserts that it is reasonable for the body to spend (some) money in satisfying the request, irrespective (yes) of the motivations for the query. It should be strongly defended. But satisfying all those requests _does_ cost public money (do forgive the earlier Daily Mail tone of 'spending my licence fee'), and it's good not to waste public money. And if (as is suggested by a trek through some of the links to 'similar requests') some fraction of those requests are either frivolous or the result of hobbyhorses being taken out for a canter, then that makes it just that little bit harder to defend FoI legislation, and makes it harder to defend sites like whatdotheyknow against assertions that they're a nest of busybodies and cranks. And it's important to defend whatdotheyknow. Whatdotheyknow and the FoI Act are part of the civil conversation we all should be having with those keeping the public service running. > I note from the link in your sig > that you are a researcher in astronomy, presumably you are in receipt > of research grants and other bursaries some, if not all, of which are > from the public purse. I'm sure there are many people who would > question why we are spending our taxes on that when it could be spent > on developing new therapies to prevent or delay the degenerative > conditions that are robbing many people of an active old age and > filling our hospital beds and nursing homes. I know this wasn't the point you were making, but... Yes, I think that all of my current funding comes, via Scotland, the UK or the EC, from one or other national government (so yes, in FoI terms I'm in the public sector). The cases for that are made in cold economic terms to ministries, and that plus pragmatic, aesthetic and cultural cases are made in magazines, TV programmes and outreach talks. You don't, as a community, get LHC-sized sums of money from straitened governments just by asking prettily. Medical researchers make different cases, to different people, and get substantially more. So people can and do question this, and are answered, and this in a variety of reasonable forums. All the best, Norman -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
