Keep the free in Freedom of Information

The Justice Select Committee will hold its first evidence session in the post-legislative scrutiny of FOIA inquiry on Tuesday 21 February.

Along with a great many other journalists, I’ve put forward some thoughts including why the idea of widening  charges for FOI requests would be an unpalatable solution to the problem of cutting the costs of administering the system.

While there’s no doubt that some FOI requests are time-consuming and therefore costly to supply, applying more fees to the process as a matter of course would, in my view, disproportionately impact on freelancers and independent publishers eg. community websites and hyperlocals.

Without the might of a news organisation behind them, even a tiny fee could be enough to deter a hard-pressed community website editor
and result in important local issues being unreported – especially in areas already suffering from lack of accountability through regional news cuts/closures.
Financial Times editor Lionel Barber warns that a cost limit could also result in having no information released at all if charges were applied to redacting of sensitive information:

“At present, cost limits only apply to the expense of locating and extracting information, but not redaction or other costs. These expenses must not be rolled within the cost ceilings. Allowing officials to count such costs towards the limit would encourage them to consider exemptions or redact heavily in order to waste time, and thereby hit the cost limit without releasing any information.”

If the system needs to be less costly, let’s look at other ways to achieve that. For example, greater transparency in what information has previously been released.

If there was proper transparency it would surely save time and therefore money as well as making the whole system more manageable and useful to the public.

In the spirit of that, I make all my FoI requests public via whatdotheyknow (view them here) and on this blog to save others’ time and the public purse some pennies.

As of January, there were 100,000 such requests in the public archive . If this, or something similar, became standard practice would the overall number of requests (and therefore costs) would be reduced without any reduction in the amount of information being made public?

* There’s also a wealth of journalists’ submissions on this at journalism.co.uk which include reports of lack of assistance from authorities, delaying tactics and extending the scope of the act.