91Èȱ¬

Blogging will be light for a period, sorry for the limited service. Meanwhile if you've been following the saga of Rother District Counicl, there have been some more developments at whatdoyouknow.com.

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Last year the Information Tribunal heard a freedom of information case between the Guardian and Avon and Somerset Police relating to material about the unsuccessful prosecution of the Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe in 1979 on a charge of conspiracy to murder.

The Tribunal's records that the Police gave the Guardian an index to documents held on the case (paragraph 15).

I made an FOI request to Avon and Somerset Police for this index. Their response stated they no longer held a copy - they had destroyed it three weeks after the Tribunal decision.

Somewhat baffled as to why they would destroy a document of that kind so quickly, I asked for a copy of their policy on record retention and destruction.

The reply to this stated: 'The 'Retention and Weeding Policy' that was in being at the time of the destruction of the Jeremy Thorpe case papers is now obsolete and has been superseded by a new 'Retention, Review and Disposal of Documents Policy' - and they refused to send me a copy of this new policy because it 'is currently being drafted and is intended for future publication'.

So I asked them to send me a copy of the old policy. But it then turned out that they could not send me that either, because 'The 'Retention and Weeding Policy' (weeding rules) that was in being at the time of the destruction of the Jeremy Thorpe case papers is no longer held as it was replaced with a new policy'.

But hang on a minute - I thought the new policy was still being drafted? So how do they decide what to retain and what to destroy?

The answer to that puzzle is apparently that the new policy, which they can't send me because it 'is currently being drafted and is yet to be finalised' is nevertheless 'being adhered to'.

I'm just wondering what this record retention policy lays down about how long Avon and Somerset Police should keep a copy of an old policy which is still in the process of being redrafted.

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Two readers of this blog have drawn my attention - for different reasons - to the Information Commissioner's Office caseload spreadsheet, on whatdotheyknow.com, following an FOI request to the ICO by .

One reader points out that, according to his analysis of the spreadsheet, the public authority which is the subject of most appeals to the ICO is in fact the 91Èȱ¬, followed by the Cabinet Office, 91Èȱ¬ Office, Department of Health and Foreign Office. (One reason for the high 91Èȱ¬ tally is that, as with Channel 4, journalistic and other editorial material is outside the remit of FOI altogether, and most of these cases are about where this line is drawn, a topic on which disappointed requesters cannot seek an internal review from the 91Èȱ¬ but have to go directly to the ICO).

The other reader points out that the ICO has not supplied the requested synopsis of each case. Its reply states: 'Our casework management system which holds all the complaints we receive ... does not record a synopsis of the nature of the complaint .... We therefore do not hold that information.'

The reader comments: 'Obviously this is wrong. The ICO must hold details of the nature of complaints. The fact that such information is not held on their handy casework management system does not mean that the public authority does not hold the information! It really worries me when those that are 'policing' FOI are unable to adhere to the Act themselves, or simply do not understand its application. I think, perhaps, the ICO should have stated that they do hold details of each case, but that collating this would exceed the appropriate limit.'

And perhaps they should have done - in the light of their decisions which I discussed earlier this month.

UPDATE Friday 18 July: Following this post, Steve Wood of the ICO is now undertaking a review of the ICO response, as on whatdotheyknow.com.

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Cherie Blair thought that Downing St officials had compiled a report into her spending on clothes which they were refusing to show her.

According to her recent memoirs, this followed a row between her and the Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull over discounts which the cost-conscious Mrs Blair had obtained from various clothing suppliers. A private secretary was then tasked with investigating the matter. 'A report was apparently written and presented, but, in spite of several requests, I never got a glimpse of it', writes Mrs Blair (p346 of 'Speaking for Myself').

I had hoped to obtain a copy of this report myself, which I could then have passed on to Mrs Blair, possibly asking for her comments in the process. But my FOI request for it has been turned down by the Cabinet Office on the grounds that they do not hold the information sought. The Histories, Openness and Records Unit tells me that they can find no evidence that there ever was such a report.

According to your own views, you may now consider that this little mystery has either been cleared up or is getting murkier.

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I wrote last month about how the website is clearly irritating some FOI officers who don't like the way it encourages and processes freedom of information requests. This ambitious site publishes the requests, the answers, and the intervening correspondence for all to see - an approach which is clearly taking transparency too far for some.

My thanks to mikeludkipz for his recent comment, drawing attention to the fact that Rother District Council is still in a lot of bother over how it deals with FOI requests through this site.

After first continuing with its previous (but apparently futile) practice of seeking postal rather than email addresses from requesters, Rother has then been telling them: 'would you please note that the response will be personal to yourself and that no consent to publish it, for instance on a web site, is given.'

As the site itself comments: 'This request has had an unusual response, and requires attention from the WhatDoTheyKnow team.'

Rother Council goes on to state: 'Any application for consent to re-use information will be considered under the Re-use of Public Sector Inforamtion Regulations 2005, but if consent is given a charge may be made to you.'

What was it said? Something like 'it's a lot more bovver with a Rovver'?

I did ask the council to explain its policy. They were very polite, but they said that sadly they weren't able to do that this week while the relevant person is on leave.

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"I've got a little list" was the famous refrain in the , but if the Lord High Executioner was a public authority in contemporary Britain, he might be more likely to sing "I do not hold the information requested and I am not obliged to create new information."

This thought about the modernisation of comic opera is prompted by the latest batch of decisions issued by the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, which make clear some interesting and important conflicts between him and the Cabinet Office.

In one the Commissioner has the Cabinet Office to reveal more records of exchanges between Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch, arguing that 'it would further understanding of the interaction between an influential media owner and the Government in a democratic system'. He also criticises the Cabinet Office for a whole series of delays and procedural errors in their handling of this request which was first made in 2005.

The other decisions are notable for the Commissioner's clear statement of policy on those cases where public authorities state they do not hold a 'list' of requested information when they do hold constituent parts of it in separate records, a strangely problematic issue I have discussed previously.

These two cases ( and ) stem from a requester apparently 'baffled' that the Cabinet Office could not provide a list of those documents it had previously disclosed under freedom of information.

Since this difficulty crops up surprisingly often, it is worthwhile quoting the latest decisions at some length:

"The Commissioner acknowledges that public authorities will often receive requests made under the Act for lists of information. In many cases this will not be information which the public authority holds in list form but the constituent data parts, instead, will be held in a database or other disparate sources. A common response to such requests is that the information is simply not held, because, as noted above, the public authority is not in possession of a physical list, as requested. A number of public authorities have further claimed that responding to such a request would involve the creation of new information.

"The Commissioner does not accept this position and instead is of the view that where a database or other electronic source contains recorded information identified in a request, the information is held, and the public authority is under an obligation to provide it (unless it is exempt) ...

"Additionally, where a public authority holds information constituent to a request (the "building blocks") in the form of manual records the Commissioner considers that it is held, provided that the work involved in providing this does not involve the exercising of more than a minimal degree of skill and judgement."

(But note however that the time involved in retrieving the information could exceed the cost limit, so a request could still be turned down on that basis).

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If you want to get really detailed financial documents from your local council, there is a much more powerful tool than the Freedom of Information Act - but blink and you may miss the chance to use it.

It's the in England, which gives you the right to see the accounts and all the accompanying financial documents for the council's audit. In Scotland it's the Local Authority Accounts (Scotland) Regulations 1985; in Wales the ; and in Northern Ireland the Local Government (Accounts and Audits) Regualtions (NI) 2006.

But it only applies for a short period each year. You've got to know when that is, and strangely enough councils don't seem to give it enormous publicity.

Now the Orchard News agency has peformed the valuable service of collating the relevant dates for many different councils.

This is a rarely used public information right. Some time back I produced a documentary for Radio 4 about access to information with my colleague Michael Crick. When as part of it he visited his local council Wandsworth in south London to look at their audit documentation, he found that he was only the second person to have done this in fourteen years.

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MPs are in the happy, or perhaps unhappy, position of talking about and voting on their own pay today.

A small part of today's will involve the question of whether MPs' home addresses should be removed from any receipts and invoices disclosed following FOI requests about spending from the additional costs allowance for second homes.

The House of Commons will undoubtedly support the motion from that the Speaker should take account of how MPs' security may be threatened by publication of their home addresses.

In itself this won't determine what should or should not be released. But it's pretty clear that in practice from now on it's unlikely that freedom of information requests about expenses will lead to the disclosure of MPs' addresses.

Although this is apparently in defiance of the (paras 37-44), there are enough caveats are special security reasons to allow MPs to use the security argument to prevent publication where the individual MP wants to - especially since the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas that on this issue he supports privacy rather than openness.

Many MPs certainly feel strongly about this, a feeling reinforced by the incident of Harman's unwelcome rooftop visitors. I suspect that on this issue they will receive more public sympathy than on their other decisions today about their pay and allowances.

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