Will NOMS improve at FOI?
If you've ever made a freedom of information request to the National Offender Management Service, you may well have found it a rather frustrating business.
That has certainly sometimes been the experience within the 91Èȱ¬, and often outside too, judging by the intervention of the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, who has just a thoroughly caustic condemnation of the way NOMS has been handling FOI requests.
The Commissioner's long list of criticisms of NOMS include the following:
• NOMS appeared to be extending the time it gives itself for considering the public interest test ‘as a matter of course’.
• NOMS repeatedly fails to give a reliable target date by which the public interest considerations will be concluded.
• NOMS does not attempt to explain the specific reasons for delay or the public interest considerations themselves.
• NOMS often initially applies the same exemption even when other exemptions are more appropriate.
• NOMS does not explain why the exemption applies.
• NOMS’s advice on requests which are over the cost limit is typically ‘unhelpful and discouraging and not in the spirit of the Act’.
• NOMS has failed to act upon the Commmissioner’s guidance.
• NOMS has failed to meet deadlines set by the Commissioner.
And that's only some of Thomas's complaints. They are featured in a formal practice recommendation, which is the time he has issued one in relation to a national public authority.
In response, NOMS says: "Given the nature of our work much of the information requested concerns prison security or public safety and we have a responsibility to ensure that these are not compromised by an inappropriate release of information. We acknowledge, however, that our performance in answering requests for information is not what we or the public have a right to expect." It adds that it will take immediate steps to implement the Commissioner's recommendations.
As I noted, Thomas's account of the extensive and systematic failings by NOMS is in line with the 91Èȱ¬'s experience of them - for example, this case, in which NOMS spent nearly a year claiming to be considering the public interest on releasing some information, justifying the delay because it said there were so many options to consider, then finally and extraordinarily and bafflingly stating that in fact it did not hold any such information at all.
Whatever its other contributions to the cause of humanity, NOMS thus seems to have solved what philosophers call the 'ontological problem' - how to think about non-existent objects.
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This also matches my experience of NOMS. What concerns me, however, is that the worst delay by far in the handling of my request is at the ICO itself. My initial complaint to the ICO was sent in October 2006. It took fifteen months for my case to be allocated to a caseworker, who promptly told me they had lost all of my documentation. Having re-supplied the ICO with this, I continue to await a response.
I waited some 2 years for Decision Notice, because of glaring dragging of feet by HMRC negligence of FOI commitment. I had been severly critical of the HMRC who, in my opinion 'took over' slowing procedings at one stage I asked the Commissioner to take control.At one stage in May 2006 the Commissisioner
instructed me to ask the HMRC for an internal review - not until 4 Months
later did I receive a full response from the HMRC. Astonishingly the Commissioner made some 10 references within the Decision Notice as to the authorities 'Accountability' I claimed the D/Notice was biased. I have also claimed it needs investigating by a higher legal authority.