By Alex Klaushofer
Public bodies need to get their house in order on Freedom of Information or face tough enforcement action, the information commissioner has made clear.
Public bodies need to get their house in order on Freedom of Information or face tough enforcement action, the information commissioner has made clear.On April 3, the Information Commissioner’s Office began a policy of actively checking to see whether public authorities have adopted the model publication scheme that came into force in January. This sets out the type of information that can be disclosed to the public in response to FoI requests.
‘We’re also going to be looking at what the FoI page is like – is it easily accessible, does it set out what to do to make a request for internal review?’ assistant information commissioner Gerrard Tracey told Public Finance. Refusing to publish a scheme could result in the ICO issuing an enforcement notice straightaway, he said.
Tracey added that the exercise will include a wider examination of how well public bodies are responding to FoI requests: ‘Rather than just checking whether there is a scheme, we’ll also have a look at the FoI handling generally.’
Under the law, public bodies have a statutory duty to respond to FoI requests within 20 days. ‘In some of these cases, you’re talking months, and I don’t think that’s acceptable,’ he said.
The decision has been welcomed by the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which this week renewed controversy about the disclosure of senior salaries in the public sector with the publication of its Town hall rich list 2009. Of the 469 councils contacted for the research through FoI requests, 23 refused to provide information and 55 failed to respond at all.
‘It’s a great move by the ICO to put checks on councils’ FoI schemes,’ said Taxpayers’ Alliance policy analyst Maria Fort, adding that the research had revealed failings in councils’ publishing schemes.
‘They hide the FoI page, or they don’t make it clear who to send the FoI request to, so it’s very complicated,’ she said.
The exact number of public authorities subject to the FoI legislation is not known, but the ICO estimates that it will need to examine practice in 110,000–115,000 organisations.
The first sector to be monitored is central government, followed by police forces and non-departmental public bodies. ‘We think they should be leading lights in terms of what they are doing,’ said Tracey.
One of the councils refusing to provide information was Chester-le-Street, a district council that became part of Durham County Council, a larger unitary authority on April 1. A spokesman for Durham said that the request did not need to be answered now that the district council had ceased to exist.
But the information commissioner rejected this view. ‘The responsibilities, including FoI, should transfer to the new unitary authorities,’ he said.
