91Èȱ¬

Bergmans Research is one political consultancy offering what it 'a confidential FoI service - we'll ask the questions for you that you can't, without your "fingerprint" being evident.'

This quote managed to make it onto the front page of a disapproving last Thursday.

But what surprises me is not that such services exist (and there are others, including some legal firms, who also make fingerprint-free FOI requests), but that there aren't more of them. It's a big business in the US, where many freedom of information requests are commercial.

A new decision from the Information Commissioner may in fact prompt more such requests. The ICO has Mid Suffolk District Council to disclose a contract, including financial details, with a company which it uses to maintain a leisure centre.

The financial parts of contracts can be sensitive territory for public authorities. The more that they become publicly available, the more we can expect to see competitors seeking copies of them, and through 'fingerprint-free' FOI services so as not to irritate the authority which is their potential customer.

The Labour MP Tony Wright, chairman of the Public Administration Select Committee, told the Independent '... if lobbying companies are putting in FOI requests to conceal the identity of their clients, then these are issues of real concern that need attention.'

But if FOI really is applicant-blind, and disclosure to one is to be treated as disclosure to all, does it really matter?

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Using freedom of information as a research tool can sometimes require a little persistence.

I've been trying for some time (well, for over two years) to obtain minutes of meetings of the . Having extracted further disclosures from HoLAC via a decision from the Information Commissioner, I am now pursuing a case at the Information Tribunal.

This week HoLAC sent me some more extracts which it has now decided - 'on reflection' - to release (extracts which the Information Commissioner thought it would be against the public interest to disclose).

So here is the House of Lords Appointments Commission performing the dance of the seven veils as it gradually uncovers more and more of one page of the information requested - at the initial stage, after I initiated a complaint to the Information Commissioner, after the Commissioner's decision, and (the latest so far) after I initiated the appeal to the Tribunal.

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Last year central government exceeded the recommended time limit for reviewing freedom of information appeals in one in three cases.

According to the Information Commissioner's , 'in no case should the total time taken [for an internal review] exceed 40 working days'. But in 2007 central government internal reviews were completed in over 40 working days in 205 cases out of 620. (And the actual proportion taking longer is probably higher, since this excludes ones not completed by the end of 2007 which are likely to have taken longer than average).

This is revealed in the on the Freedom of Information Act, published today by the Ministry of Justice. It collects statistics on FOI requests to government departments and other selected major central government bodies.

The departments which had particular problems last year in getting their internal reviews finished promptly included the Department of Health and the Treasury (Table 7).

The annual report also shows that, out of those departments which process large numbers of reviews, the Ministry of Defence is by far the most likely to modify the initial response sent to the requester (Table 6). It's not possible to say whether this actually involves sending them more information, nor whether it is due to the open-mindedness and thorougness of the reviews or the inadequacy of the first responses.

The total number of reviews has dropped significantly for the second year running, while the number of initial requests is broadly stable (Table 10). This may suggest that central government is managing to develop a higher quality of initial response during the period FOI has been in force.

The report discloses as well (Table 9) that in 2007 there were around 750 cases where central government broke another time limit by the Information Commissioner - the extended period allowed for considering whether it is in the public interest to release information asked for.

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In Britain the Department of Administrative Affairs is famous as the fictional organisational setting for the TV series 'Yes, Minister', but in the US the White House really does a department called the .

The OA has now found itself at the centre of an FOI-related legal dispute initiated by an . This stems from claims that the White House may have lost millions of emails from its records system. A judge yesterday that the OA doesn't have to disclose its internal assessments of the scope of the problems with the White House email system.

Despite the fact that the OA had been responding to FOI requests for years before this lawsuit started, the judge decided that it was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act as it only performed administrative functions and had no executive authority.

I think Sir Humphrey would have enjoyed that one.

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The WhatDoTheyKnow site - which facilitates the making of FOI requests - has been more successful than I expected in terms of the which have been made via the site.

But it also seems to be annoying some of those people on the receiving end of the requests. Some are not happy that the way it works means that the entire correspondence between requester and public authority is made available to all through posting it on the internet, not just the information eventually disclosed (as in this case).

An official from Norfolk County Council complained about this at the FOILIve conference last week. And I heard similar complaints yesterday from some Police FOI officers at a meeting organised by ACPO.

However the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas was pretty dismissive of this complaint. It looks like FOI officers will have to learn to live with it.

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Does discussing freedom of information send people into a frenzy?

Not normally in my experience, but it did apparently have this effect last week in the Nigerian Parliament.

Proceedings in the House of Representatives were held up for more than 20 minutes after members rejected a proposed FOI BIll. According to , 'Members went into a frenzy, giving one another pat on the back after a resounding 'nay' ended a protracted debate on whether to debate the report.'

The Bill was rejected despite the fact that the Deputy Speaker apparently tried to confuse opponents by framing the motion in such a convoluted way that a 'nay' shout actually counted as support for the Bill.

The report continues: 'The confused members, who did not understand the question shouted 'nay.' But when they realized the meaning of what they chorused, they started shouting against the question. Members ignored the plea of the deputy speaker that the House had handled a more delicate issue and that the House would equally handle the present issue. His call for the House to collapse into an executive session was rejected, as members spoke into their microphone simultaneously, shouting No! No! No!'.

FOI laws are being adopted by an increasing number of countries internationally but not it seems for the moment in Nigeria.

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FOI only helps you get access to information which a public authority actually has. If the information has been mislaid, destroyed, burnt, lost in the post or inadvertently placed in a skip and taken for landfill - or if, for example, the House of Commons has old expense claims from MPs - FOI can't recreate the information and give it to you.

If you have views on the retention policies for government records, or other aspects of records management, now is the time to express them. The National Archives has today launched a on a revised version of the code of practice on records management.

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Downing Street officials ensured that Tony Blair did not personally have to sign official records stating the financial contributions to Labour made by people he was nominating for peerages. This was partly on the basis that it would be 'helpful' if he did not sign declarations which might turn out to be inaccurate. This is revealed in a document (see paragraph 6) which the 91Èȱ¬ has received through a freedom of information request.

This happened a few months before the former Prime Minister proposed peerages for four businessmen who had made large secret loans to Labour.

In early 2005 his staff persuaded the independent House of Lords Appointments Commission, which the propriety of suggested Peers, that the required certificate setting out the nominees' party donations should not have to be signed by the Prime Minister.

The purpose of these certificates was to disclose any gifts to the party made by a proposed Peer and to assure the Commission that a peerage nomination was not connected to any such donations.

Blair's officials argued that 'if it turned out that a particular certificate was not entirely accurate, it would be helpful if the Prime Minister had not signed it.'

Their case also stemmed from 'the fact that the Prime Minister may not personally have the detailed knowledge of donations combined with the difficulty in his finding time to sign the certificate'.

This document is one of a batch I obtained from the House of Lords Appointments Commission under the Freedom of Information Act. HoLAC wanted to keep this material about Blair secret, on the basis that the officials' views had been provided in confidence, but was by the Information Commissioner after I appealed.

These quotes appear in a paper prepared in January 2005 by the HoLAC secretariat. In the version originally and voluntarily provided to the 91Èȱ¬ by HoLAC, this passage was blacked out. The Information Commissioner has now forced HoLAC to release the entire document, along with some other information it wanted to withhold.

HoLAC considered the secretariat paper at a meeting in February 2005 and decided to drop its proposal that the certificate should be signed by the party leader, allowing it instead to be signed by the party chairman.

This was a few weeks before Labour started taking large undisclosed loans around the time of the 2005 general election. Later that year four major lenders were then nominated by Tony Blair for peerages, provoking the 'cash for peerages' controversy when details of the loans eventually became public. A police investigation into the affair ended with no charges being brought. The nomination certificates for HoLAC, which did not mention the loans, were signed by the Labour party chair, Ian McCartney.

Relations between HoLAC and Downing St deteriorated sharply once the Commission started to consider these nominations, about which it had much unease. The conflict between them is made clear in other extracts from HoLAC meeting minutes which it has also now been forced to release.

HoLAC decided to oppose some of the prime ministerial nominations because they would have 'a negative effect ... on the reputation of the House of Lords'.

The minutes of one meeting show that the Commission felt that 'No 10 seemed to mis-understand the nature of the Commission's judgment'. At another point HoLAC expressed concern that No 10 was forwarding information about nominations 'without any comment on the propriety of this'. And when HoLAC members eventually found out about the secret loans, it recorded that 'it was agreed that non-disclosure of loans went against the spirit of the declaration'.

The enforced disclosures also reveal (paragraph 5 of the paper on vetting) that in early 2005 the Conservatives pressed HoLAC 'to be flexible' in its approach to its requirements that Peers should be UK residents. However the Commission decided that it would continue to insist on UK residency.

This issue of residency has become controversial in the case of certain Tory Peers. The Commission has expressed its disappointment at the failure of to fulfil a pledge to become resident in the UK for tax purposes. The tax status of the Conservative Deputy Chairman Lord Ashcroft .

The 91Èȱ¬ is now pursuing a case at the to seek the disclosure of some further extracts from the minutes of HoLAC meetings.

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If a court takes a decision you don't like, what should you do about it?

One possible response is to tell everyone to ignore it, although that's probably not the reaction you'd expect from the Ministry of Justice, the government department which oversees the country's judicial system.

Yet that's what it's been doing, according to Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information in a speech given to the yesterday. He drew attention to several cases where on how to process FOI requests appears to conflict with Information Tribunal decisions.

For example, does the time taken to redact information count when deciding if a request is too costly to process? The MoJ , the Tribunal .

Belinda Crowe of the MoJ responded to Frankel by saying that the MoJ was sticking to its position where it thought the Tribunal had misinterpreted the law. However my guess would be that officials who tell the Information Commissioner that they decided to follow the MoJ's interpretation of the law in preference to the Tribunal's are unlikely to impress him.

The conference also heard about the continuing difficulties faced by the Information Commissioner's Office in reducing its large backlog of complaints. Richard Thomas, the Commissioner, revealed that at the end of March 7% of his caseload had been with him for over two years and another 25% for over one year. Further details will be given in his annual report next month.

The problems of delay were also highlighted by Maurice Frankel, who reported the results of current CFoI research into the time the Commissioner takes to initiate investigations in those cases which lead to formal decision notices. These tend to be the harder and more important cases which can't be dismissed on obvious procedural errors or resolved informally.

His sample showed that the ICO took an average of 258 days to first make contact with the public authority subject to the complaint involved. In the most extreme case it had taken 586 days after receiving a complaint before it first contacted the 91Èȱ¬ Office about it.

Belinda Crowe also talked about how the government is hoping to turn some of the negative stories into good news stories by at least taking credit for releasing information which should be released. She added that it is still putting together a 'package of next steps' on the question of extending FOI to other bodies.

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