An MP blogs about Freedom of Information changes

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 November 2006 at 17:10
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism

Labour MP Tom Watson has posted on his blog about the government’s proposed changes to the Freedom of Information Act fee regime. Unfortunately, Watson seems to have swallowed the government’s line highlighting the number of silly requests it has received for things like “the total amount spent on Ferrero Rocher chocolates in UK embassies”.
But Watson seems to be missing the point. This is a very important debate, not about the odd silly request about chocolates, but about a proposal that could significantly limit legitimate, public-interest FOI requests.

Many journalists who use the FOI Act in a serious way fear that these proposals could make it very difficult for them to use the act effectively to hold government to account.

The plan to allow public bodies to “aggregate” multiple unrelated requests from multiple individuals could mean reporters in big news organisations like the BBC — or local papers that generally only ask questions of a handful of local public bodies — would be limited to a single question per month or forced into silly games like filing requests in their friends’ names.

The government is framing this debate as being about the cost of FOIA implementation, but that also seems somewhat dubious.
As Steve Wood of the UK FOIA Blog has pointed out, the government’s £35m annual cost estimate is actually far lower than the £125m it said it expected to spend when the current fee regulations were drafted in 1999.

So the government appears to have been happy to pay up to £125m per year on FOI in 1999, but is suddenly concerned about an actual cost of £35m? And if cost is the real issue, why has it adopted a proposal that would apparently save a mere £900,000?
Fourteen senior journalists from the Sunday Telegraph wrote to Lord Falconer last week outlining these and other concerns about the proposal. Others — like the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum, the Guardian’s Rob Evans and David Leigh, and freelance Heather Brooke — have disputed various assumptions and conclusions made by the report into FOI costs produced for the government by Frontier Economics.

Meanwhile, in a Kafkaesque twist, the Department for Constitutional Affairs has denied an FOI request — submitted by Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information — for some of the data underlying the Frontier Economics report.
More than 100 MPs signed an early day motion encouraging the government not to introduce up-front fees for FOI requests, a plan that ultimately wasn’t included in the government proposals. Hopefully more MPs will start asking questions just as probing as the bloggers, campaigners and journalists.