Civil servants divided over FOI response
New revelations under freedom of information demonstrate the widely varying approaches that different civil servants have towards openness and releasing documents.
A range of official attitudes is illustrated in papers disclosed recently by the Cabinet Office to Professor Alasdair Roberts, an international authority on FOI based at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.
In 2005 Prof Roberts had asked the government for details of FOI applications referred to the Cabinet Office by the "clearing house" at what was then the Department for Constitutional Affairs - these would be particularly difficult, complex or sensitive cases.
His first request was answered in early 2005 by the Histories, Openness and Records Unit (HORU) of the Cabinet Office, which provided material he wanted. But when he then made another application for later data, things got more difficult.
Some officials outside HORU weren't happy about answering Prof Roberts, because his request was a "meta-request" - a request about the handling of other FOI requests.
The HORU official who initially provided him with information later wrote a memo adopting a rather confessional tone:
DCA is the Department for Constitutional Affairs, which has become the Ministry of Justice. TSol refers to the Treasury Solicitor's Department, the government's lawyers.
While some other parts of Whitehall wanted to reject meta-requests under section 36 of the FOI Act following a "public interest balancing test" (PIBT), in June 2005 HORU still appeared willing to respond positively to Prof Roberts and another requester who wanted details of HORU cases.
But according to a HORU briefing note, 10 Downing St had a different viewpoint.
In due course it was decided not to release the requested material. But this left some officials struggling with how to justify to Prof Roberts that giving him the information he wanted would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs.
Nevertheless the plan to keep the material secret was confirmed and presented for ministerial approval.
All this has now been revealed thanks to a further FOI request from Prof Roberts about the treatment of his meta-request - in other words, what could be called a meta-meta-request. The Cabinet Office at first refused to disclose this material but then did so after a ruling from the Information Commissioner, which followed an earlier ICO decision that he should also be given the case information he was seeking.
Prof Roberts says:
"For several years, officials in central government denied that the central clearance process caused unnecessary delay, or did anything other that assure consistent responses to FOI requests. Here is a case in which top-level coordination produced substantial delays. The documents suggest that the process also gave No 10 the opportunity to push for non-disclosure even though the officials immediately responsible could not see a risk of harm."
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Freedom of Information has to be complete or it becomes a nonsense. If officials and politicians can decide what can and cannot be disclosed then they are in a position to avoid releasing information that would be embarrassing to the government or to them personally, precisely the sort of information that should be released. The whole FoI thing was deliberately botched in this country to avoid disclosing how badly things are run by the government and the Civil Service. You only have to look at MPs' expenses, Defence procurement, major IT contracts - the list is endless and we only find out about them through leaks or when it's too late to do anything about it.
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There are a variety of circumstances where FOI cannot be complete and for very good reason that has little to do with ministerial or official embarassment. The location of sheltered accomodation for victims of abuse and indeed other information such as names, addresses and job functions of people working there is one example. The vast majority of FOI requests I had to deal with in my previous life as a civil servant were from "ambulance chasers" and journalists pretending to be ordinary citizens in order to tease out some new "nugget" of information to rehash an old scandal in the vein of "true life" journalism. Of course, complete FOI would have rendered all the "Govt. loses data disc on train/pub/laptop" scandals (of last year) obsolete, but there is a good reason that data is private and should remain so. Often journos try to circumvent the process of an investigation so that they can put their 'particular slant' on a story and there have already been a number of cases where reportage has prejudiced court cases to the point where miscarriages of justice occur. Complete FOI would make this a daily occurrence. We already have a Govt. that cannot differentiate between 'evidence' and 'intelligence' & the media certainly don't have that concern, they're not likely to run a story on the lines of "FOI request destroys evidence chain, now greedy bankers get off scott free"
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Congratulations to Prof Roberts and to the Information Commissioner for a successful outcome.
Transparency is a way to get more honesty and better government.
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I can attest to the reluctance of the Cabinet Office to see the FOI system working smoothly. I and others have been trying to get information about the extent to the which the government was aware of a major potential breach in our national telecommunications security in 2006, 2007 and 2008, with the installatioin of DPI equipment from BT and Phorm, and it has got to the point where Cabinet Office starting blocking reasonable specific requests out of hand as "vexatious" - the resistance to releasing information seemed to definitely be located in the Cabinet Office - and became the subject of (successful) appeal and reversal. DBIS have sometimes volunteered more information than they were asked for, suggesting a political agenda, whereas Home Office has been "blood out of stone" territory.
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The current FOI process is not being used to make government open at all. A specific issue where there are many examples is the British Telecom and Phorm Webwise tests of the last few years (which BBC contributors have written good blog content about in the past)
There appears to be a number of government departments in London offices that are reluctent to share the detail of meetings, emails and forulation of policy, history of discussion etc
Particularly of late the departments concerned have resorted to the "Vexatious" clause in the FOI Act, claiming that requestors are repeatedly asking for information (apparently when they have only asked once it would seem in a few cases)
I follow much of this on the excellent What DO They Know website and I have made two succesful postal requests via Royal Mail. On the WDTK site one only has to utilise the search functionality for the word "Phorm" to see how some requests have been quickly dealt with and others, for seemingly no reason, remain unanswered.
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@2 Pandatank
I can only assure you, as someone who frequently makes FoI requests, that I am not an 'ambulance chaser' neither am I a journalist nor working in any section of the media.
Hope this reassures you!
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I am in the 'interesting' position of an information blackout. I'm an Indian national, living in India and married to a Scottish national. I do not live, work or earn in the UK and have never applied to do so. My husband has applied for legal aid in Scotland on a matter relating to his children from his first marriage.SLAB has demanded that he obtains my financial information
to assess his application.This was communicated to him
as compulsory and not as a voluntary response from me. As a senior mediaperson, I am extremely uneasy at the position of a state authority/agency in the UK seeking to access highly personal information from a foreign national who would they could not by any stretch of logic have any jurisdiction over. I requested in writing that SLAB provide me with the specific legislation that empowers them and with case law + precedents prior to obtaining any information from me as I wished to ensure my rights were not being infringed upon. I received...precisely nothing. Curious that a UK agency may exercise a right to seek information from a foreign national but have no obligation to provide information.
Is that how it is supposed to work?
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