A predictable feature of any demonstration is a large gap between the numbers said to be present by the Police and by the protest organisers.
Take for example the Stop the War demo in London in February. The organisers spotted - they said 60,000, whereas the Police gave out a figure of 10,000.
Estimating the size of a large, scattered, varying, unregimented and mobile crowd is a far from easy task. But a factor of six is a pretty big discrepancy too.
The 91Èȱ¬ put a freedom of information request to the Metropolitan Police for full details of the process used to calculate the numbers present at this demonstration.
This is how they replied (incidentally after about six months rather than within the legal deadline of 20 working days):
"The GLA Licence Trafalgar Square for 19,999 persons. This, they estimate, is Trafalgar Squares capacity. The North Terrace Capacity is approx. 8,000, with the remainder of the Square being approx. 12,000. So, on the 24th Feb, with the majority of the North Terrace being barriered off and with Staging & Screens on the main Square, capacity is reduced. On this occasion numbers were estimated by an officer standing on the steps of the National Gallery during the event. After taking into consideration of the above, and the large gaps around the Square, they estimated the numbers never exceeded 12,000 at any one time.'
However, a maximum figure at any one time doesn't tell you how many people took part in the protest at some point, as marchers came and went through Trafalgar Square. This would suggest that the Police figure was certainly an underestimate.
The risk of a terrorist attack was wrongly used by the Scottish Executive as an excuse to keep information about radioactive contamination of drinking water secret.
The story to justify this rather striking intro appeared in the latest .
Reading the Scottish Information Commissioner's heavy criticism of the Executive may resonate with anyone who feels they have experienced a public authority trying to scrape some extreme factors into a refusal to supply information.
The freedom of information request in this case was made by Rob Edwards, a freelance journalist who has made much use of FOI. He keeps an interesting list of his FOI requests and their outcomes on .
The 91Èȱ¬ Office has been in touch with me following the item below. They make the fair point that their poor score on adverse decisions from the Information Commissioner is mainly due to their bad record of excessive delays in the early period of FOI. This is what they say:
"You state that the 91Èȱ¬ Office has had most complaints upheld against it by the ICO. This is factually correct but actually misleading as we now have a very good record with the ICO on substantive decisions.
"In the early days of FOI we had a number of decisions upholding complaints about delays – 13 in total. These mostly stem from early 2005 when our performance on answering requests on time was poor – it has improved significantly since then. It is also misleading because the ICO no longer issues decision notices in these sorts of cases (section 10 complaints).
"In terms of actual FOI decisions we have made to withhold or release information our record is good – there have been 6 decisions relating to the HO – 5 upheld our decision (1 with an adverse comment about providing advice) and 1 partially upheld our decision (the ICO’s website says the complaint was fully upheld but this is an error)."
Last month I analysed which reasons for keeping information secret are most often upheld by the Information Commissioner, based on his office's .
It is also possible to use this database to look at which public authorities have most frequently had cases against them upheld by the Commissioner.
The authority with the most adverse decisions against it is the 91Èȱ¬ Office, which has had complaints against it upheld (wholly or partly) by the Commissioner in 15 cases.
The 91Èȱ¬ Office is followed by the Cabinet Office and the House of Commons, both of whom have had 11 complaints against them wholly or partly upheld.
I should note that the 91Èȱ¬ of course has also suffered a number of advese decisions, amounting to seven. But the most noticeable thing about the 91Èȱ¬'s record is that it also has a particularly high number of cases (ten) where the Commissioner has rejected complaints. It seems in fact that the Commissioner has dismissed more complaints against the 91Èȱ¬ than against any other authority.
(As last month, I stress that this is a fairly crude analysis. For a start, it doesn't reflect the seriousness of those breaches of the law which the Commissioner has found, nor his changing priorities affecting in which cases he issues formal decision notices).
Incidentally the search tool on the Commissioner's site which has been used to make these calculations leaves something to be desired, to put it mildly. The listing of public authorities contains numerous duplicates and discrepancies.
For example, it features not only the Department of Trade and Industry but another department seemingly named the Department for Trade and Industry; it lists two apparently different police forces called the North Yorkshire Constabulary and the North Yorkshire Police; and even when it comes to the appeals the Commissioner has decided on in relation to his own office, the list distinguishes between one public authority entitled 'Information Commissioner' and another entitled 'The Information Commissioner'.
If you're interested in how freedom of information works in America, you might like . It calls itself a 'carnival of open records', collecting together what it describes as the 'best posts from the FOIA-sphere', even if it seems to work on the basis that the FOIA-sphere is no bigger than the US. It looks like the plan is hold the carnival on a weekly basis at different sites.
Ever heard of the Multinational Chairman's Group? I hadn't either.
It does sound a little like the kind of shadowy yet powerful organisation which is believed by some to control the entire world, but from what I can make out it seems to be a lobbying group of big bosses who occasionally meet the Prime Minister to argue their corner.
We may soon know more about it, as the Information Commissioner has the Cabinet Office to reveal some background briefing material relating to the meetings. However Downing St won't have to disclose the speaking notes officials prepared for Tony Blair, partly because he might not actually have bothered to read out the points that his minions felt he ought to be making.
One interesting little detail of the judgment is that whoever requested the information did so on 4 January 2005, the first working day of the FOI era. And I thought we were meant to live in a time of instant gratification.
The Commissioner's announcing the judgment, issued today, focuses somewhat surprisingly on the information to be withheld not that to be released.
It's the latest in a series of 'dog bites man' with a topline angled on the Commissioner backing public authorities when they have kept information secret. Anyone would think that the Commissioner is trying to get a reputation for protecting secrecy.
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