Oral evidence
was presented to the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the House
of Commons. The Information Commissioner, when challenged by MPs on
14th March, rejected most of the complaints but claimed his office
was under-funded.
Maurice Frankel, chair of the Freedom of Information Campaign,
gave evidence to the Committee on 28th March. He said that delays
in dealing with FOI requests were "a problem at every stage" of the
FOI process. He said user experience was characterised by a delay
"in responding to request", a delay "in completing internal
reviews" and lengthy delays "in getting decisions from the
Information Commissioner".
He also pointed out that "there is a nominal 20 working-day
response period, but it is expandable for an unspecified reasonable
period, whenever public interest is to be considered".
Steven Wood, a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University who
runs a FOI blog, told MPs: "The longest [delay] I have experienced
is 70 working days".
He said you are often in a quandary as to whether you want to
complain to the Commissioner because "if you take your complaint
about the delay to the Commissioner, the Commissioner only
investigates the delay". Thus if the public authority applies an
exemption at a later stage "you then have to go back again" and
complain to the Commissioner about the same request.
In relation to "the Commissioner’s performance and, in
particular, the backlog of appeals cases", Frankel said that
problems existed with "the quality of the notices and the
investigations". He was concerned that when the enforcement
arrangements in the legislation were designed, people assumed "that
the tribunal would be there to hold the Commissioner back" and that
cases before them would relate to public authorities complaining
about the release of information. In practice, he said, "what the
tribunal are doing is pushing the Commissioner forward" saying that
more of the requested information should have been released to the
applicant.
Wood also told the Committee that "a perception may be building
up that the Information Commissioner perhaps lacks the authority to
be able to get through these cases quickly", and that public
authorities "may be downgrading their risk analysis to do with what
they think the risks from the Act are to them".
Frankel agrees. He added that there as a risk that some FOI
applicants would ask: “What’s the point of this Freedom of
Information Act if I can’t get a decision?”.
David Hencke, a journalist at the Guardian specialising in
Parliamentary matters, told MPs that he had a "feeling that they
[the OIC's office] are not very well organised" and that
"I also rather wonder about the resources that they put aside"
because "there seem to be far more cases coming up to them than
they obviously anticipated".
Dr Lydia Pollard, representing Local Authorities, told MPs that
when public authorities have contacted the OIC for informal
guidance, "They have been advised, that the Information
Commissioner’s Office was not able to give that because it might
prejudice a complaint".
She added that in some instances "guidance has been slow to come
out".
But in his own evidence, Information Commissioner Richard Thomas
rejected most of the complaints. The backlog of requests arose, he
said, because of the Government's decision to implement FOI across
all public authorities at the same time. He added that there was a
"complexity and the lack of tidiness" in which cases for a decision
were presented to him and this added to the work to be done. The
result is that "each case is taking substantially longer than we
had anticipated", he said.
The Commissioner said that recruitment of suitably qualified
staff was an issue. He told MPs that, as the starting salary was
£15,000 a year for a complaints handling officer, "you will not get
very many people at those sorts of salaries who have got extensive
experience of working inside the public sector at a senior
level".
Thomas added that his Government grant for FOI work was
inadequate and that he had put in a bid for an extra grant of £1.13
million to add to his baseline funding of £5 million per year. He
said that if the full sum was granted, his office could clear the
backlog within 14 months.
In relation to the standards and quality of the work produced by
staff, MPs were told that the OIC had "included in our recovery
plans specific action to address the issue of training of staff,
performance and knowledge management".
The Constitutional Affairs Committee is expected to report in
the summer.
