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John Hamill is a long-time secular campaigner and participates in the Free Thought Prophet. We talked about his epic Freedom of Information request.
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You can see there that John’s story tells a pretty damning tale about the attitude of the Department of Education and Skills, as it’s now called, towards the Freedom of Information laws. And I really don’t want to single out that one department, this attitude is pervasive right across government.
Nevertheless, I did send a list of written questions to the Department of Education’s press office that related to this case. The main question I asked was about this culture of seeking to frustrate the proper implementation of the law. The department refused to answer.
The next most important question, in my view, was about the practice of just flatly refusing to accept an FoI request, saying that they were dealing with it outside the FoI process, and then refusing to grant a review because, according to them, they question was dealt with outside of the FoI.
Since this is entirely illegal – the FoI is mandatory, it’s not something that they can choose to apply or not – I asked the Department if they accepted that the law applied to them and they had to follow it whether they liked it or not.
In response, a spokesperson said, quote:
The concept of providing information “outside of FOI” is undertaken by public bodies to allow for information to be provided where it may not be covered by the FOI Act or where requests do not relate to “records” (for example, many requests are often in question form).
This is profoundly dishonest answer. As was entirely clear from my question, nobody is quibbling with the department applying common-sense flexibility and giving citizens more information than the bare minimum that is required in law, the problem is of course when they refuse disclose records that the are required to hand over, and then saying that because they made that decision to refuse ‘outside the framework of the FoI’ that you can’t request a review of the decision, as set out in the FoI law.
This is not a rare occurrence; I’ve had it happen to myself. This is where you send an email to the email address foi@ whatever department, with the subject line Freedom of Information request, the first line of the email is I want to request records under the Freedom of Information act… and the public body refuses the records, and then say that because they unilaterally made that decision to refuse outside of FoI, you can’t ask for a review of that refusal.
The department also refused answer my question asking what disciplinary process applies to staff who defy the FoI laws, but they did admit that not a single member of staff has ever been disciplined for that, so presumably the answer is none.
Finally, the spokesperson said “the Department does not believe that any change is required”. I don’t think we needed an FoI request to get that nugget of information.
