The Information Commissioner Richard Thomas public authorities to adopt a more 'robust' approach to rejecting 'vexatious' freedom of information requests, issuing updated in the summer.
Mr Thomas has said that public authorities could reject more requests as vexatious than they have been doing. Perhaps his stance is now having an effect.
Take this case - is it vexatious to The Cabinet Office seems to think it is.
Of course it would have been easier for the Cabinet Office to answer this question for Mr Brown's predecessor. In the case of the famously Tony Blair (a pen and paper man, according to Alastair Campbell), the answer would almost certainly have been none.
It's not normally the function of this blog to act as a recruitment agency, but here's what could be an interesting job - .
Some past comments from a senior royal official suggest they could indeed benefit from assistance from someone with a good grasp of FOI law.
I suppose it could make a nice appointment for a journalist who knows about FOI, but I assume that Buckingham Palace has tightened up on its procedures since
Whatever happened to 'disclosure logs'? When freedom of information started in 2005, the government encouraged public authorities to post copies of FOI disclosures on their websites, so that they would easily be available to others as well as the person who asked for the material.
There doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for disclosure logs in practice. I expected more public bodies to set them up than have done so, and some of those that were keen to start with now seem to hardly bother with posting many new disclosures.
This is reflected in the recently launched , a useful collection of resources for records management in higher education. It looks like the authors of this site have only managed to locate HE institutions with such a log.
When I've run training sesssions for 91Èȱ¬ journalists on freedom of information, one very frequently asked question has been: 'How can you be sure they are really giving you all the information they should?'
I wouldn't want to encourage cynicism. But if you're already a cynic, you might be interested to read from the Information Commissioner criticising the Police Service of Northern Ireland. If you have a short attention span, you could start with paragraph 23 of Annex 2.
I mentioned yesterday that under the Data Protection Act I'd obtained from the Department for Children, Schools and Families information they hold about me. (And since in the past I've been scornful about how the DCSF's predecessor, the Department for Education and Skills, has handled various FOI applications, I ought to state that the DCSF seems to have handled my data protection request professionally and co-operatively.) Other points of interest in this material included:
• FOI is meant to be 'applicant-blind', and some FOI officers are punctilious about ignoring the identity of the person seeking information. Yet, although I sent a request from my home address and it was not made in the course of my 91Èȱ¬ work, DfES officials who emailed each other about it kept referring to me as a journalist, even if they seemed confused about what journalism I did (one wrongly asserted I worked on Panorama, another referred to me as 'political editor at the 91Èȱ¬'). Maybe they just surmised I might end up writing about it anyway ...
• The fact that the Information Commissioner's Office took over a year to start investigating a complaint from me meant that the DfES at first assumed I had taken over a year to complain to the ICO.
• After I recently recounted some of my experiences with the DfES, one official who found it 'interesting' emailed another to say 'I'm sure we can expect more'. Sorry not to have delivered on that until now.
When freedom of information started in 2005, the government set up an internal process to ensure consistency across different departments. It created a within what was then the Department for Constitutional Affairs, to coordinate responses to . In turn the Clearing House referred some - the even trickier cases - on to the Cabinet Office.
We should soon find out more about how this system operated at the start, thanks to a leading international academic expert on FOI, Professor . The Information Commissioner has just that the Cabinet Office should comply with an FOI request of his about cases passed from the Clearing House to the Cabinet Office.
Some critics have regarded this central machinery to oversee departmental FOI handling as an 'Orwellian' apparatus designed to maintain secrecy. On the other hand DCA civil servants have insisted to me that the Clearing House has actually encouraged reluctant departments to release more than they would have done if left to their own devices.
I recently obtained some information from the Department for Children, Schools and Families which may shed light on this, in one case anyway, when I asked for the material they had on me under the Data Protection Act.
It turns out that according to one briefing sent by an official to a ministerial committee, the Department for Education withheld information from me 'on Clearing House advice'. (The Information Commissioner later decided that some of these documents should be given to me.)
The FOI specialist Heather Brooke on her 'Your Right to Know' site an interesting sidelight to the 'Public Sector Rich List' issued yesterday by the Taxpayers' Alliance, partly compiled through freedom of information research. She lists seven states in the US where the salaries of state employees (not just the highest paid ones) are publicy available.
That's a good indication of different cultural attitudes to personal privacy on different sides of the ocean. In the UK the Information Commissioner would clearly not enforce such a policy of disclosure for the pay of ordinary rank-and-file workers.
If you enjoy reading government documents which have been revealed under freedom of information, you're probably going to a lot of different sources to do that.
A new website launched today in the US, is an attempt to tackle this by bringing together into one place material obtained under FOI by a variety of different organisations. It has full-text searching and allows readers to add their own comments about what's there. The site is a collaboration by a coalition of American non-profit citizen action groups, who have the benefits they think it will bring.
This concept has something in common with the , a mySociety project in the UK which aims to facilitate the making of FOI requests and the publication of responses.
Tom Steinberg of mySociety says that they are about half-way through building their site, but it will be at least another three months before it's launched. And his team are still puzzling over what to call it ... Well, that's always the hardest decision.
I'm sorry that the blog wasn't in operation for the important government a fortnight ago that ministers have abandoned their planned restrictions on freedom of information.
It's almost exactly a year since the government said it was 'minded' to constrain FOI. Under pressure it then held a formal consultation on its specific plans and later was pushed into further delays with a broader consultative exercise on whether change was needed at all. Now it has finally concluded that FOI doesn't need to be curtailed. Why?
I think the key factors are firstly the campaign against the changes led by the journalism trade paper Press Gazette, the Society of Editors and the Campaign for Freedom of Information; secondly Gordon Brown's proclamation of a different style of government; and thirdly the failed attempt by David Maclean to exempt MPs from FOI which created so much fuss that any restriction on FOI became politically much harder to implement.
Gordon Brown also announced a new on which bodies FOI should now be extended to cover (a step that was originally planned for the first year of FOI in 2005).
I wonder if Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, will respond. One of my colleagues attended a he gave last week, and tells me that perhaps surprisingly for someone who was within the innermost circles of state secrecy, Sir Richard said he was 'not averse' to freedom of information.
His reason was that it had helped to define more clearly where secrecy was required and thus avoid unnecessary secrecy 'debasing' what needed to be genuinely secret. So I don't think Sir Richard will be suggesting MI6 as a body performing a public function to which FOI should be extended.
Meanwhile those of you who like making FOI requests to the 91Èȱ¬ may be interested to know that the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas the notion of FOI applying to ITV and Sky as well as the 91Èȱ¬ and Channel 4. However, this is rather a theoretical possibility. It doesn't seem to me very likely that private companies of this kind will be made subject to FOI, even if they're not quite as demanding of secrecy as MI6.
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