Is anyone asking?
It's International Right to Know day.
The world's information commissioners are meeting in Oslo, while amongst other global happenings to mark this event later this week there's a Right to Know Fun Walk in the Cayman Islands.
The Cayman Islands is one of the half-dozen places to have adopted a freedom of information law in the past year. This has brought the number of countries or territories with such legislation to 90.
But there's a huge difference between the existence of a legal right of access to state information and many people actually making use of it. This is confirmed by a recent analysis of these 90 laws by the Dutch FOI researcher Roger Vleugels.
He shows that for around half the countries for which statistics are available, the annual number of information requests is less than one per 100,000 inhabitants.
The UK as a whole comes eighth in his league table of requests per inhabitant, and he puts Scotland with its own FOI Act, ninth. Other countries with active cultures of asking for information include Mexico, Japan and Ireland.
While noting that there are issues about the true international comparability of the figures, it still seems clear there is one state with much the highest rate of formal FOI requesting - and that is the USA.
The right to know is one thing - actually asking questions is another.
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I'm asking. Matter of fact I asked in early July but, so far, my Council's prevaricated and dawdled.
Don't bother the FoI Commissioner either. He's too busy with a backlog of complaints.
So the FoI's a dead letter in the UK. Unless you're a Tory researcher. Because they said only "left-wing busy bodies want freedom of information". And nobody wants to stop helping them.
So there we have it. Or, in many cases nowadays, don't have it after all.
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Is "freedom of information" a good thing in the UK ?
Well, up to a point.
Some information seems to be sought just for the sake of revealing it.
A fee should be introduced to obtain information. At present it's the jolly old taxpayer, ( ie you and me ), who foots the bill for servicing information requests.
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I can't help agreeing with the first commenter. If you ask for anything meaningful they put up the shutters and then you have to wait for years to get the ICO to do anything.
I will repeat again what I've said before (and I know you can do nothing about it) but the BBC is one of the worst offenders. It treats the FoI Act with complete contempt and frankly heads ought to be rolling at the top.
Why don't you write something about this?
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/3/18/bbc-holds-the-law-in-contempt.html
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What about more transparency inside the media?
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