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The Government's proposals to restrict the Freedom of Information Act
The Campaign for Freedom of Information
In October 2006 the government announced proposals to make it easier for public authorities to refuse Freedom of Information requests on cost grounds.
The effect of these proposals would be to severely restrict the amount of information that could be obtained under the Act.
At the moment, an FOI request can be refused if the cost of dealing with it exceeds £600 for a government department, or £450 for any other public authority.
In calculating whether these limits have been reached authorities can take into account the costs of searching for and extracting the requested information.
The government proposes two substantial changes to these rules.
First, authorities would be able to include the cost of the time spent reading the information, consulting others about it and deciding whether it should be released.
Requests that are complex, sensitive or raise important public interest issues are likely be refused on cost grounds under these proposals, regardless of their merits.
Second, the government has proposed that the cost of unrelated requests made by the same individual or organisation to an authority could be aggregated and refused if their combined cost exceeded the £450 or 600 limits.
This could severely ration use of the Act by the media, campaigning organisations and others.
The Campaign believes that these proposals would severely damage the FOI Act.
On December 14 2006 the government published a consultation document containing draft regulations. These make some minor changes to the proposals themselves.
For example: authorities would have to show that it was "reasonable in all the circumstances" to aggregate requests from the same applicant.
In deciding whether to do so, authorities would take account of the level of disruption caused by dealing with the requests, whether the applicant was acting in an individual capacity or for a business or professional reason (the implication being that it would be more reasonable to aggregate in the latter case), the number of requests the applicant had made in the past and whether the applicant had previously been "uncooperative or disruptive".
These factors would fundamentally undermine the principle that disclosure decisions should be "applicant blind" and depend on the nature of the information sought, not the identity of the applicant.
The cost that could be attributed to considering a request would be capped at £400. This means that consideration time alone could not exceed the £600 limit for requests to central government.
For other authorities the cap would be £300. The same caps would also apply separately to the costs of consultation, permitting a combination of both to take costs over the limit. The cost of the time searching for the information would also be counted.
If the cost of consideration or consultation time was £100 or less, it could not be counted by a government department. For other authorities, the threshold is £75. But if these limits were exceeded, the full amount including the first £100 or £75 would be counted.
The consultation will run until 8 March 2007. The government initially indicated that it intended to introduce the new regulations in Parliament on 19 March - and bring them into force on 17 April.
However, ministers have subsequently suggested that this is not their timetable.
It is nevertheless still possible that the government will introduce the regulations relatively soon after the consultation ends.
http://www.cfoi.org.uk
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