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What the FOI?
January 6th, 2007 at 02:50
I’ve been messing about with the Freedom of Information Act recently, and its yielded some (fairly) interesting results. What is the Freedom of Information act? Long story short, you’re allowed to write to any public sector organisation and ask them to, er, free information.
You could waste a serious amount of money by sending all sorts of requests in – they don’t even have to be in a letter, as an e-mail will do just fine! In fact, that’s probably why they’re apparently trying to limit the act- because idiots like me are wasting so much government time.
At work a few weeks ago I received an e-mail outlining the guidelines on reporting paper-cuts and near miss reports for when you narrowly avoid a paper-cut. Seriously. Paper-cuts. Minor cuts caused by paper colliding with the skin. Seriously.
It seems utterly bonkers to me that someone would go to the trouble of reporting a paper cut, so I did the one thing anyone in my situation would do: I sent a FOI request to loads of government departments asking them how many paper cuts they’d had reported in the last year. Admittedly, the response wasn’t fantastic, but it did highlight some interesting limitations and problems with the current act- and shows why information isn’t really that free.
So I started off by e-mailing my local district council: they had a grand total of zero paper-cuts reported in the last year- surely a miracle given the amount of paper pushing that goes on in government. Leicester City Council on the other hand reported an incredible three paper cuts in the last year- one each in October, November and December.
I also got in touch with the Ministry of Defence. As you might have guessed- its probably a pretty dangerous place to work. They had seven paper-cuts during 2006 (four of which occurred during March). I think its fair to say that our boys are making an incredibly brave sacrifice to ensure our security. Obvious satire: I guess the bad guys could be developing staplers that can deploy within 45 seconds.
I just hope some of the paper-cuts happened whilst some James Bond types were out shooting terrorists.
The other organisations I hassled contacted were a bit more awkward about it. HMRC denied my FOI request stating that they cannot “create” new data- apparently each office has an accident book, but there’s no central store of this information (well, tedious fact: there apparently is in former-Customs, but not in former-IR). Basically this means that if I had a bucket containing ten fingers that had been severed by paper cuts, I could probably tell you about each finger individually if you ask about a specific finger, but I wouldn’t be willing to count how many fingers there are in there. Er, the analogy breaks down about here, I think.
This strikes me as a pretty big problem with the FOIA- if you don’t know the structure of the organisation you’re contacting, then it could be very easy for them to not tell you what’s going on. It presumably also makes it easy to hide any potentially scandalous information, as providing the dodgy news only exists scrawled on the back of discarded envelopes that have been distributed and hidden around the country, the organisation are at no obligation to provide you with this information, as they don’t have to compile it for you.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office cited a different section of the act to try and get me to go away. They claimed that my FOI request was “lacking in serious purpose or value and can only be treated as vexatious”. How dare they?! I said in my e-mail I was doing some “research into office safety” – I thought that made me sound pretty official. Clearly not.
I also looked up vexatious in the dictionary to see what it actually means. It apparently means “annoying: causing irritation or annoyance”. To use a dictionary example of when the word would be appropriate: “a pesky mosquito”. The Foreign Office are calling me a pesky mosquito!
I don’t know if this is a badge of honour or something I should sit in the dark and have a cry about.
So they can deny you access to information because they think that you’re irritating. That doesn’t strike me as very democratic: a democratic society should give even Richard Littlejohn access to vital public information.
The Foreign Office also exposed another massive flaw in the act. I submitted a separate request to see if I could get hold of a list of gifts Tony Blair has received whilst in office- unfortunately, they got out of this one by telling me that it’d cost over £600- or equivalent to three and a half working days of a civil servant’s time to get hold of this info. Damn.
This makes me think two things though: just think of how much government money you could waste by submitting loads of annoying but just about passable FOI requests? You could have an entire department of office juniors working on finding out all sorts of tedious information- and it’d cost loads in both money and time.
Secondly… if they have to research whatever inane request I send in, are they not creating information… something others claim that they don’t have to do? Or does this mean that other organisations might actually have to create information? It seems odd to me that despite being covered by the same set of rules, one organisation will tell me one thing, yet another will apparently do exactly the opposite (providing its under six hundred quid).
So yeah, the Freedom of Information act is a bit of a mixed bag… hopefully I’ll have some more FOI fun soon, as I’ve submitted a couple of other exciting requests. Check back regularly, kids.
UPDATE 26/02: Just got a reply from the Home Office. They’ve had four paper cuts – two in April 2006, and two in May 2006.
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