The coalition agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, published today, promises an extension to the FOI Act. The relevant section states:

UNESCO will celebrate World Press Freedom Day, observed yearly on May 3, with an international conference of media professionals entitled Freedom of Information: the Right to Know, in Brisbane on 2 and 3 May. In a message UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, enshrined in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But around the world, there are Governments and those wielding power who find many ways to obstruct it.
…
This year’s theme is freedom of information: the right to know. I welcome the global trend towards new laws which recognize the universal right to publicly held information.

Unfortunately, these new laws do not always translate into action. Requests for official information are often refused, or delayed, sometimes for years. At times, poor information management is to blame. But all too often, this happens because of a culture of secrecy and a lack of accountability.

We must work to change attitudes and to raise awareness. People have a right to information that affects their lives, and States have a duty to provide this information. Such transparency is essential to good government.

The United Nations stands with persecuted journalists and media professionals everywhere. Today, as every day, I call on Governments, civil society and people around the world to recognize the important work of the media, and to stand up for freedom of information.

The conference programme is available to download here. The conference will be streamed live on the internet – http://www.wpfd2010.org/

The Ministry of Justice has published the 2009 annual statistics on the handling of FOI requests in central government.

Executive summary 

• In 2009, monitored central government bodies received a total of 40,548 non-routine FOI and EIR requests – a 16 per cent increase on the number received in 2008. 

• The number of requests received by all the monitored bodies averaged about 10,100 per quarter during 2009. Departments of State received 59 per cent of the requests, while the other monitored bodies received the remaining 41 per cent. 

• 82 per cent of requests received a substantive response within the 20 working-day limit. A further 5 per cent of requests were subject to a Public Interest Test extension. 

• 58 per cent of “resolvable” requests (those where it was possible to give a substantive decision on whether to release the information being sought) were granted in full in 2009. 23 per cent of resolvable requests resulted in the information being fully withheld. 

• Of the 40,548 requests received during the year, 3 per cent were subject to a fee being levied. Of these, 99 per cent were in relation to requests received by the National Archives. The average amount of paid fee was £54 

• 8,754 requests received during 2009 were refused, either in full or in part, where one or more exemption or exception was applied. The most commonly applied exemptions were under section 40 (personal information) and section 30 (investigations and proceedings conducted by public authorities), however, the profile of exemption usage differed between Departments of State and other monitored bodies. 

• A total of 1,502 Internal Reviews were requested across all monitored bodies in relation to information requests received in 2009, on the grounds that some or all of the requested information was withheld. 

• There were 206 appeals made to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) relating to the refusal of information requests by monitored bodies in 2009 and where the monitored body in question had been notified of the appeal – an increase on the 153 made in 2008.

The report shows that requests to central government departments incur more delays than those to other monitored bodies – the percentage of requests responded to within the 20-day deadline was 75% for government departments compared to 91% for other monitored bodies. A number of departments answered barely half of requests within the 20 day deadline (MoD 53%, Scotland Office 58%, Home Office 59%). Quite why the Scotland Office’s record should be bad when it received only 179 requests, is not clear, although it did release the information in full in 79% of those requests.

Download the report here.

The Conservatives have promised to extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act within weeks of the general election.

Expanding the Freedom of Information Act
We will expand the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to include taxpayer-funded bodies such as Northern Rock and Network Rail, together with bodies such as the Local Government Association. This will give the public access to a huge amount of government information currently available only to Ministers.

Background
Under Labour, the Freedom of Information Act excludes a wide range of taxpayer funded bodies which exercise power over areas ranging from railways to the Olympics budget to energy efficiency projects and road traffic penalties.

Conservative policy
A Conservative government will increase the range of publically funded bodies that are subject to scrutiny using Section 5 orders under the Freedom of Information Act. These bodies will include:

• Network Rail
• Northern Rock; 
• The Carbon Trust; 
• The Energy Saving Trust; 
• NHS Confederation (in relation to activities in receipt of public funds); 
• Local Government Association; and 
• Traffic Penalty Tribunals

Section 5 of the Freedom of Information Act enables Secretaries of State to designate organisations that appear to exercise functions of a public nature to scrutiny under the legislation. We will extend the Freedom of Information Act to these organisations within weeks of the General Election.   

The plans were published in a document detailing nine Big ideas to give Britain real change in politics, which also included further details about the right to government data included in the Conservative manifesto (see earlier post here)

The Right to Data Act will give members of the public a legally enforceable ‘Right to Data’,  so that the public has the right to appeal if public bodies refuse requests for data collected by government.

This radical policy will put the public in the driving seat when it comes to requesting and receiving government datasets containing anonymised but socially or commercially useful information. Once published, there will be a continuing obligation to publish that data on a regular basis for as long as it is collected.

This legislation will be introduced as soon as possible, but even before the draft bill has  become law, a Conservative government will improve transparency by launching spending transparency and making a wide range of government datasets available to the public. 

Minutes of the last First-tier Tribunal (Information Rights) User Group meeting on 11 March 2010 have been published on the Tribunal’s website.

Download the minutes here. 

I’ve just noticed two other pieces of guidance published by the ICO in March:

Writing a refusal notice (Version 1.4, 22 March 2010)

Justifying redaction: does a public authority need to justify every redaction separately? (Ref. AN010, v0.3, 3 March 2010)

The Liberal Democrats are the only one of the 3 main parties to specifically mention Freedom of Information in their election manifesto. The Lib Dems are promising to:

Strengthen the Data Protection Act and the Office of the Information Commissioner, extending Freedom of Information legislation to private companies delivering monopoly public services such as Network Rail.

The Lib Dem manifesto also pledges the introduction of a Freedom Bill to restore civil liberties. A draft Freedom Bill published last year contained proposals to remove the ministerial veto from the FOI Act and limit the Act’s exemptions.

The Labour and the Conservative manifestos both promise to make more government data public. The Labour manifesto states:

Citizens expect their public services to be transparent. We will open up government, embedding access to information and data into the very fabric of public services. Citizens should be able to compare local services, demand improvements, choose between providers, and hold government to account.

We have led the world with the creation of data.gov.uk, putting over 3,000 government datasets online. Entrepreneurs and developers have used these datasets to unleash social innovation, creating applications and websites for citizens from local crime maps to new guides to help find good care homes or GPs. We will now publish a Domesday Book of all non-personal datasets held by government and its agencies, with a default assumption that these will be made public. We will explore how to give citizens direct access to the data held on them by public agencies, so that people can use and control their own personal data in their interaction with service providers and the wider community.

While the Conservative manifesto says:

we will create a powerful new right to government data, enabling the public to request – and receive – government datasets in an open and standardised format. Independent estimates suggest this could provide a £6 billion boost the the UK economy…

A Conservative government will bring in new measures to enable the public to scrutinise the government’s accounts to see whether it is providing value for money. All data will be published in an open and standardised format.

The Conservative manifesto explicitly promises to:

• publish all items of spending over £25,000 online, and he salaries of senior civil servants in central government will also be published.
• require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissable in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale and organograms that include all positions in those bodies;
• require senior civil servants to publish online details of expense claims and meetings with lobbyists
•  apply these transparency principles to local government, with the threshold for publication and spending items and contracts set at £500, and for publication of salaries the same as at the national level
• …publishing in full government contracts for goods and services worth over £25,000; and
• increasing the accountability of EU spending by publishing details of every UK project that receives over £25,000 of EU funds
•  publishing full details of British aid on the DFID website. This will include spending data on a project-by-project basis, published in an open and standardised format
• publish all performance data currently kept secret by the Department for Children, Schools and Families
• publish detailed data about the performance of healthcare providers online
• oblige the police to publish detailed local crime data statistics every month

The Conservative manifesto also repeats a promise made in their policy paper Reversing the Rise of the Surveillance State, that they “will strengthen the powers of the Information Commissioner to penalise any public body found guily of mismanaging data”. However, the manifesto does not mention the policy paper’s commitment that in future the Information Commissioner would be appointed by Parliament rather than the Ministry of Justice.

UPDATE 21/4/10: The Green Party manifesto promises:

Free up information – allow us to see the data they have on us.We believe that citizens should be entitled to access to information held by Government except where specifically restricted. Restrictions should protect the privacy of individual citizens and national security. Information on policy formulation, the conduct of public affairs, the environment and health and safety should be freely available.

It also reports the following disclosure under FOI following a request from a Green councillor:

Green councillor earns fairer rents deal for seafront traders
After Conservative-led Brighton & Hove City Council hiked rent and other costs for many seafront businesses, members of the Seafront Business Association asked local Green Councillor Jason Kitcat for help. Through a Freedom of Information request Councillor Kitcat revealed a council deal with private chartered surveyors, who would receive a commission of 30 per cent on any rent increase they could negotiate with the seafront traders, on top of their fixed fee. As a result, the assessment of the majority of seafront rents has now been handed to a new in-house team; the result should be fairer rents for traders.

There is an interview with the Information Commissioner Christopher Graham in the April 2010 edition of Public Servant magazine, which is now available online.

“We are off the back foot and organisations have to respond to a more robust ICO,” he explains. “Some of them have learnt the hard way. For example, the London Development Agency didn’t want to make information available about certain land acquisitions in connection with the Olympics. And they kept changing the grounds on which they were withholding the information, so we got to the position where we said ‘we will publish the decision notice with the information we have to hand’.

“It can’t go on forever. At some point, you have to call people’s bluff. I also let it be known to the Cabinet Office that I wouldn’t hesitate to issue an information notice – it’s the sort of thing you only have to threaten. If anyone was tempted to game the system, that has now stopped.

“All the permanent secretaries heard me say recently that we are getting tougher. I borrowed the slogan from Sainsbury’s – ‘you’ll taste the difference’. Nobody is under any illusion any longer that information requests can just be spun out forever.
…
But he acknowledges that large quantities of routine information are still not being published without legal challenge.

“An awful lot of public money is currently being wasted in rather futile fights over appeals and High Court cases,” admits Graham. “We have one case involving the location of mobile phone masts that is going from the Supreme Court to the European Court and you just think: ‘can this be right – how much money is going to m’learned friends?’ The civil service mindset has to become a bit more modern.

“Because of the times in which we live and the impact of the internet, public authorities really need to get engagement with citizens. You get local authorities that are good at this and those old-fashioned councils that are bad at it. Where councils are on the front foot, people feel involved and consulted – whether it is over a 20mph speed limit on residential streets or how the money is spent on local parks.

“It is usually the same authorities that don’t do FoI very well that also don’t do things like children’s services and financial management very well. I am a great believer in hitting people with the boring facts; they are usually much less interesting than the conspiracy theories.”

Full article here.

The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, which provides for a transition from a 30 Year Rule to a 20 Year Rule governing the automatic release of most government records, received Royal Assent on Thursday 8 April 2010.

Although key elements of the bill including plans to hold a referendum on the electoral system and to end hereditary peerages, were dropped in the dramatic last 48 hours before the formal dissolution of Parliament for the general election, the amendments to the Freedom of Information and Public Records acts survived. For a detailed explanation of the amendments see earlier post here. 

See also:
Ministry of Justice website here.
Marathon session to pass bills before dissolution of parliament, The Guardian 8/4/10

The ICO has published new guidance on:

How to redact and extract information (version 2.2, 3 March 2010)