Blaming the black hole
When I've chased up a government departmental FOI officer over what's happening to a request I made a long time ago, I often get told (off the record, naturally) more or less the following: "It's not our fault - blame the Clearing House. They've been sitting on it for weeks."
The is the unit within the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) to which departments should refer particularly tricky or sensitive requests. And there's a long of what counts as tricky or sensitive.
The riposte from Clearing House staff (equally off the record) is that the departmental FOI officers would get all sorts of things wrong if the Clearing House team wasn't able to stop them sending out the unsatisfactory letters which they would if left to their own devices.
Just a normal tale of inter-departmental rivalry in Whitehall? Or is there a genuine issue of delay caused by the Clearing House?
Well, many FOI officers and requesters certainly think that the Clearing House operates like a black hole, outside the normal rules of the space-time continuum. Once you send something in there, you can never be sure when if ever you will see it again.
The problem is that when the 91Èȱ¬ asked the DCA for data on how long the Clearing House took to deal with cases referred to it, they replied that they couldn't tell us that as they didn't actually keep the information.
However possibly some light has now been shed on this matter thanks to a fascinating by Prof Al Roberts, an international expert on FOI. He shows there is a remarkable correlation between those departments which are slow in their FOI responses and those which refer many cases to the Clearing House.
Of course that doesn't prove anything, perhaps they just get the trickier cases. Could it be spurious? As Al Roberts says, "It's tough to tell, given the refusal of DCA and other departments to release documents or data that shows the internal workings of the FOI process."
Until and unless the DCA reveals more data on the operation of the Clearing House, it's certainly the kind of thing which will add to the suspicions of its critics.
And there is one intriguing detail in Prof Roberts' graph - the one outlier is the Treasury, which manages to be the slowest department of all, without even the bother of getting the Clearing House involved in many of its cases.
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