91Èȱ¬

There will now be a break in the wob-blog. Back in November.

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I have only just discovered that I'm a wobber and that what you are reading is a wob-blog. All is explained at this which explains how to use freedom of information in different European countries.

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I wrote last weekabout Robert Brown, the accountant from Jersey who thinks he is Princess Margaret's illegitimate son and made 638 freedom of information requests to the National Archives to try and prove it.

Mr Brown has had a good piece of news today in his determined campaign to establish his royal ancestry. He wants to see the wills of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. Unlike other wills, those of senior members of the Royal Family are . He failed in first legal attempt to get access to them, but has today been given permission to appeal against that judgment.

Interestingly, today's Appeal Court decision does not seem to stem from attaching any credence to Mr Brown's parentage claim or to a private right of his to see the wills. Instead it seems to be based on accepting that he could arguably assert a general public interest in whether it is right for the wills to be sealed. This raises a much wider set of issues about the exceptional secrecy of royal wills.

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The principle that an individual's medical history should be private and not public information goes back to the Hippocratic Oath. The confidentiality of the patient-doctor relationship has been an assumption of medical ethics ever since and has been acknowledged by exemptions in freedom of information laws worldwide.

And the secrecy of a dead person's medical records was only last month by the Information Tribunal, after a hospital had refused to supply details to a mother about the treatment of her dead daughter. (Although it should be noted that the general position on a dead person's medical records is ).

But are there times when it's in the public interest for a living individual's medical records to be public and reported in the media? It looks like this issue may now in the row over the health minister Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang.

And it won't be the first time a politician's medical history has raised questions, from Tony Blair to Francois Mitterand.

So what was it that Hippocrates actually Only to keep secret that which should not be divulged.

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The Freedom of Information Act is supposed to be 'applicant-blind'. What this piece of jargon means is that a freedom of information request should be treated in exactly the same way whoever makes it. In practice it doesn't always work like that.

According to a last week from the Information Tribunal, the National Archives appears not to have abided by this principle, when it turned down a wide-ranging FOI request because the applicant could not provide enough documentation to substantiate his claim that he is the illegitimate son of Princess Margaret.

The applicant, an accountant from Jersey named , seems to have felt this left him in a Catch-22 situation, as he replied 'If I had sufficient evidence to substantiate a claim I would not find myself in the frustrating position of having to search all possible archives'.

Mr Brown - or should that be Viscount? - proceeded to make 637 more specific requests to the National Archives (TNA) 'on the grounds previously stated'. TNA decided to try to deal with these requests in batches. The way it did so met with , but not of the Tribunal which has now over-ruled the Commissioner. Having looked at the decisions, my view is that TNA's system for batching its work on this was co-operative and reasonable although not within the letter of the law.

Still, however applicant-blind the law is meant to be, I'd recommend that you do not accompany an FOI request with a claim to be 12th in line to the throne (unless, of course, you are Viscount Linley, in which case it may help speed up the response if you draw attention to this fact).

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Do you get confused between Iraq and Iran? Easily done, especially at moments of high pressure. It sometimes happens to Gordon Brown.

Although this blog is mainly concerned with access to government records, this item will stray a little into the question of their accuracy.

When Gordon Brown gave his prime ministerial press conference on Monday, he mis-spoke at numerous points. Perhaps it was one sign of the stress he was under as he faced intense and critical questioning over his general election wobble.

At one point, for example, he referred to having been in power for several days. He managed to correct that one himself, but other errors went by without him realising. However they've been put right for him in the , which doesn't record what he said but what he presumably meant to say.

So the transcript corrects some minor confusion between whether a journalist was putting a 'statement' or a 'question' and between whether making tax promises you can't keep causes economic 'stability' or 'instability'.

When he spoke, he also said that the Iraqis must hear the message that interference in another country's internal affairs without support from an international organisation is unacceptable. He clearly intended this as a message to the Iranians, and the transcript records him as saying 'Iranians' although he actually uttered 'Iraqis' twice.

It's well known that Hansard presents a tidied-up rather than verbatim version of what MPs have said, but there is nothing in the Downing St website's to indicate that it does the same.

Of course it's easy to understand why Downing Street wouldn't want its site to be telling the world that Brown was issuing warnings to the Iraqis that he really intended for the Iranians. So there's certainly a case for not simply transcribing clear errors word for word.

But in this era of transparency and trust, perhaps the most honest response would be for the transcript to be accurate, while adding a note that he actually meant to say something else.

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If you appeal an FOI decision to the Information Commissioner, you are still going to have to wait a long time for an answer. The Information Commissioner's Office is failing to reduce its sizeable backlog of freedom of information cases.

That's clear from the records of internal ICO meetings which are published on their website. According to the , just released, the executive team was told last month that 'over the course of the year to date 50 more cases had been added to the total number of cases held by the office ... the backlog was not being reduced despite the extra resources'.

The ICO argues that it is now closing cases more quickly, but the problem is because it is receiving new complaints at an even greater rate, leading to the net increase in the total number of cases held.

One sidelight on the delays comes from from July, when 55 decision notices were then awaiting signature and 'the oldest ready for signing was 152 days old'.

The latest executive minutes also reveal more of the extent of the ICO's financial problems. The ICO decided it had to ask the Ministry of Justice for additional funding because of unexpected legal costs stemming from the number and complexity of Information Tribunal appeals. The executive minutes state that without additional funding 'participation in appeals would have to be reduced to a bare minimum'.

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Evidence suggests that the staff of the National Offender Management Service are carefully selected for their creative and imaginative (perhaps even escapist?) thought processes, a trait to be spotted from time to time in their handling of freedom of information inquiries.

Last October the 91Èȱ¬ asked NOMS for some information on Operation Safeguard, the scheme in which police cells have been used to hold prisoners in response to prison overcrowding. NOMS replied that it was considering whether it was in the public interest to release material, because of the exemption to protect law enforcement.

Every few weeks since then it sent us another letter saying that it needed additional time, as assessing the public interest test on whether or not to release anything was taking longer than anticipated. The Service said it was applying the test in relation to whether disclosure would harm security and good order in prisons. It explained that the repeated delay was because 'there are so many options to consider'.

That is until last month, when NOMS (now part of the Justice Ministry) finally and surprisingly informed us that 'after an extensive search, I regret to inform you that the Ministry of Justice does not hold the information that you have requested'.

Which raises the question as to how they have managed to spend nearly a year thinking about whether it would harm prison security to release non-existent information.

Possibly NOMS has acquired a new public service function, of providing philosophers with new case material for the study of some of the trickier .

As , 'Whether or not there are non-existent objects seems to be one of the more mysterious and speculative issues in ontology.' Personally I also find the possible existence of non-existent documents one of the more mysterious issues in freedom of information.

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The Serious Fraud Office has revealed it has already spent over £2million investigating the defence company BAE, including on its controversially abandoned probe into the firm's dealings with Saudi Arabia.

In response to a freedom of information request from the 91Èȱ¬, the SFO disclosed that its investigations into BAE had cost £2,177,000 by last month. This figure does not take into account the salaries of permanent staff working on BAE or central overheads, so the full cost would be greater.

The sum given includes expenditure on the into the huge Al Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, as well as into other aspects of BAE's operations. The SFO says it can't give a specific figure for the cost of the Al Yamamah element of its probe into the company.

£140,000 of the money was spent between mid-July and mid-September, so other inquiries are clearly still active.

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