Freedom of information not free:

In a cost cutting move, the government has proposed making it far easier for public authorities to block requests for information.

The government estimates that 1 in 8 requests which currently have to be answered would be refused on cost grounds in future.

advertisement
FOI requests are normally answered free of charge, but government departments can reject requests if they would cost more than £600. For other public authorities, the limit is £450.

At the moment, authorities can take account of the of the cost of finding and extracting information. Under the new proposals they would also be able to include the time spent reading the documents, consulting and deciding whether to release them.

The cost limit would be reached more quickly and many requests which are currently answered would be refused. But here’s the twist. Ministers insist on dealing with many requests themselves, particularly those that are politically sensitive.

The Act does occasionally require their involvement - one of its exemptions can only be triggered by ministers. But in general they are only involved because they choose to be: the driving factor is ministers’ concern to avoid bad publicity.

Adding the cost of minister’s time and the extra briefings and meetings that go with it, make it more likely that requests will be refused. The more contentious the issue, the greater the chance of a refusal. Does your request suggest that a policy is not working, an error has been made or a problem is much worse than admitted?

The possibility of exposure could trigger hours of agonised Whitehall discussions, tipping the cost pendulum against you.

A second more shocking restriction would apply to what the government calls “serial requesters”. These are experienced requesters who are familiar with the Act, especially journalists. Their probing questions require more time to answer than the average - so the government has decided to clamp down on them.

In future, all requests made by the same individual or organisation to a given authority will be lumped together and refused if their combined cost exceeds the £600 or £450 limit. A single request from a newspaper or broadcaster may trigger the cost limit allowing the organisation to be blacklisted for 3 months.

Suppose someone at the BBC asks the Department of Health for information about MRSA. That single request could use up the whole of the BBC’s quota, preventing any of its other journalists - on any programme or channel - from asking about hospital closures, cancelled operations, medical confidentiality, patient abuse in care homes, dangerous drugs, flu vaccine or anything else.

The ban would last for 60 working days, at which point one lucky journalist would be allowed to make one additional request, before triggering another 3 month blackout.

Imagine the effect on the regional press. A local paper making a single request about a planning application could use up its FOI quota at the local authority, preventing it enquiring about schools, social services or safety problems.

The public will be left in the dark. A consultants’ report suggests that the proposed new restrictions would save central government about £5.6 million a year, with roughly similar savings from the rest of the public sector. Yet the total annual cost of the legislation, about £35 million, is only a tenth of what the government spends on publicity campaigns through the Central Office of Information.

FOI is one of the means of exposing wasteful spending by public bodies. The Act, introduced less than 2 years ago, has provided a constant flow of information about the costs of contracts, consultancies and expenses claims.

The most striking example comes from the Scottish FOI Act, where disclosure of Members of the Scottish Parliament’s individual expense claims has, for the first time led to fall in the total claimed, after several years of year on year growth.

The Constitutional Affairs select committee recently described the FOI Act as “a significant success” reporting that it had brought about “the release of significant new information…(which) is being used in a constructive and positive way by a range of different individuals and organisations.”

The Act, which Labour had introduced after 25 years of commitment to the issue, could be one of the government’s success stories.

For all its problems - and there are plenty - the Act is helping to make government more open, exposing decisions to greater scrutiny, and reducing some of the barriers between public authorities and the public. Instead, of reaping the credit the government is proposing to throttle back, if not actually, throttle, its own legislation.

Maurice Frankel is director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

www.cfoi.org.uk