Freedom of Information
A vital tool for journalists and
campaigners
Basic background
• On January 1 2005, five important new rights to information came
into force:
• The Freedom of Information Act 2000; the Freedom of Information
(Scotland) Act 2002; The Environmental Information Regulations
2004; the Environmental Information Regulations (Scotland) Act
2004 and Amendments to the Data Protection Act 1998
• Freedom of Information Act covers more than 100,000 public
bodies including all UK Government departments, public authorities
in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Applies to the House of
Commons, House of Lords and the Welsh and Northern Ireland
Assemblies; the FOI (Scotland) Act provides similar, although slightly
better, rights to information held by the Scottish Executive, Scottish
public authorities and the Scottish Parliament. NHS bodies including
GPs, dentists; schools, colleges, universities; the police, quangos,
BBC (though not in relation to journalistic materials) are all covered.
• 30,000 requests a year
• The Act has six objectives, as defined by the UCL
Constitution Unit:
• To ensure greater transparency of public bodies
• To ensure greater accountability of public bodies and
politicians
• To increase public participation in government
• To improve government decision-making
• To improve the public’s trust in government
• To improve the public’s understanding of government
Environmental information
• If the information you want relates to the environment,
your request will not be dealt with under the FOI Act
but under the Environmental Information Regulations.
These implement a European Union Directive and
provide stronger rights of access than the FOI Acts. A
feature is that information about emissions to the
environment cannot be withheld on grounds of
commercial confidentiality.
• Definition of ‘environmental information’ is wide: it
includes information about the state of the air, water,
land, natural sites and living organisms including gm
organisms. Covers discharges to the air, water or land
including energy, noise and radiation
One expert view
• ‘The Freedom of Information Act 2000 has changed
journalism in Britain. Four years after it was introduced
the flow of news stories relying in whole or in part on
information gained through a request to a government
department, agency or statutory body has become
continual. Although Government ministers insist that
the act was not created for the benefit of journalism,
there is no doubt that for a number of journalists the
Act has altered the way they work and their
expectation about the information they can gather
through it.’
• Jeremy Hayes (2009) A Shock to the System
Benefits to journalists
• Improves accuracy by having access to official
documents
• Broadens considerably access to previously
concealed/unpublished information
• A more exclusive way of gleaning information
from public bodies than Written Answers
which are published in Hansard
• (handout)
Journalists have been known to make
frivolous requests
• Examples of frivolous questions using the FOI Act:
• How many toilet rolls were used at Number 10
during Tony Blair’s administration
• How many accidents have there been in the BBC
TV Centre’s toilets
• How much does John Prescott weigh
• What type of tea is drunk at the MOD
• How many exorcists are employed by
Westminster Council’s housing estates
department
Civil Servants hate it
• (Gus O’Donnell handout)
• There has been recent exposure of ways Government departments have
tried to get around the Act, by putting sensitive information into personal
emails. The Campaign for Freedom of Information, a charity, is now
lobbying hard for a strengthening of the Information Commissioner’s
powers to prosecute authorities or officials who destroy information to
prevent its release under the FOI.
• Special advisers and the Secretary of State for Education are reported to
have deliberately used private email accounts to keep correspondence off
the department’s official servers. Maurice Frankel, director of the CFOI
said of the matter: “If the emails had once existed but been destroyed
before a request was made, no offence would have been committed –
even if they were deliberately destroyed to pre-empt any future request.”
• Under section 77 of the Act it is an offence for a Public Authority or official
to deliberately destroy, alter or conceal a record which has been
requested under the FOI Act. The penalty for this is a fine of up to £5,000
NOT a universal panacea, sadly
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Not enough money for the Information Commissioner to deal with a large backlog
of cases
Sometimes information is heavily ‘redacted’ for no apparent reason
Journalists claim ministers are ‘weakening’ the Act, especially by manipulating
delays in the process
Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information says that
particularly in the early years, public bodies were guilty of ‘redaction mania.’
The BBC has continually resisted publishing high-flying stars’ pay because of the
exemption for anything that comes under the vague categories of material used by
the corporation for ‘journalistic, artistic or literature purposes.’
Journalists complain that public bodies routinely use the excuse that the request
exceeds the cost limit (£450 or £600 depending on the public body you are
approaching).
Government departments can hide behind ‘information not held’ excuses – but as
this example shows, honesty is often not a priority:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/warmfront_scheme
UCL study
• Professor Robert Hazell of UCL’s Constitution Unit has produced a report
on the legislation: ‘Does FOI work? The impact of the Freedom of
Information Act on Central Government in the UK’. Professor Hazell argues
that as many as two thirds of FOI-originated stories led to a decrease in
trust in the Government, focusing on financial misuse, poor performance,
inefficiency and failures.
• Hazell’s findings include:
• Public participation has NOT increased as a result of FOI. ’99.9 per cent of
the population do no not make FOI requests. Newspaper reporting of FOI
does not encourage them to participate.’
• He argues that newspaper reporting has decreased, rather than increased
trust. ‘Two thirds of the press stories which we analysed were likely to
decrease trust. This is not a failure of the FOI, but a failing of the press,
reflecting editorial values which strongly select negative stories.’ Is this
true, or is this a case of blaming the messenger? Is it the fault of the press
that there is so much financial mismanagement, poor performance and
failing in public bodies?
The research has identified 8 ‘iron
laws’ of FOI:
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1) The media are central players – given that so few people make FOI requests,
journalists are the key conduit for shaping public perceptions based on FOI. The
government’s battle with the press over negative FOI stories is one that can never
be won.
2) Government holds all the cards: It holds the information and can resist
disclosure for years if it wants to, and exercise a veto.
3) Both sides will game the system. Both requesters and officials do this.
4) Government will always be seen as secretive. There will always be friction in
this area, especially between Government and the media.
5) FOI never settles down. Although in terms of case law and bureaucratic routine
it has begun to settles down, at a wider political level it never does.
6) A few FOI requests cause most of the trouble. A few high profile cases cause
disproportionate effort, media attention, public controversy and political pain. (eg
expenses)
7)FOI does not increase public trust. This is because of the media’s predominantly
negative reporting, exacerbated by government resistance to media requests.
8) Officials have nothing to fear from FOI, save for the extra burden on resources
Remember: this research was conducted with the help of an ESRC grant
More research
• There is an interesting article on journalists’ use of FOI published in
the Open Government Journal:
http://www.opengovjournal.org/article/view/771/791
• Here are some of the key points:
• In most other countries, the proportion of journalists using FOI to
total requester population is low. In Canada it is around 10 per cent;
in the US it is around 5 per cent; in Australia use amongst
journalists is ‘particularly low.’
• In Sweden, figures suggest 40 – 70 per cent of journalists’ articles
use information obtained through FOI.
• Figures suggest that in the UK, journalists’ use of FOI requests is
higher than in other countries: ‘half of all requests made to central
government in the first month of operation of FOI were filed by
people identifying themselves as journalists.’
• What does this tell you about UK public engagement with politics?
contd
• FOI response times in some countries are slow and cumbersome. ‘The 20working-day response time’ feels like an eternity in a 24/7 news
environment. Exemptions are seen as ‘too broad and too readily applied.
Journalists are put off by the fact that access to whole classes of
information, such as high level government papers…is generally denied.
• Costs are in some countries seen as excessive – in Australia journalists
have been asked to pay up to Aus$70,000 – a reason why take up in
Australia is so low.
• In Sweden, where take up is highest, requests are dealt with almost
instantaneously and almost all requests are granted. In the UK, FOI is of
most use to long term investigative reporters.
• In some countries, like Canada, if officials know the request is from a
journalist, then it is given an ‘amber light’ procedure: it takes longer and if
it is sensitive, minsters are given briefings on how to deal with the fallout.
contd
• An analysis of newspaper articles in 2005 showed that 602 used
information obtained through FOI, 64 per cent in the ‘quality’ press and 36
per cent in the popular press, with the Guardian, Times and Sunday Times
publishing the largest number of FOI-information based stories.
• The most prominent types of stories were those relating to costs and
expenses (21.2 per cent), with the least number relating to domestic
security matters (1.5 per cent). 9 per cent were described as ‘whimsical or
trivial’; 6.4 per cent were to do with ‘malpractice or impropriety.’
• The reasons journalists gave for using the Act were, in the early months
the ‘novelty’ factor; later on, because the Act gave them access to more
information than they would normally get.
• One journalist received information from the Metropolitan Police about
the costs of policing Abu Hamza’s preaching outside the Finsbury Park
mosque and said: ‘If you went to the press office they would say the figure
is not available, and they certainly wouldn’t go and get it for you.’
• Another journalist said: ‘It’s made a noticeable difference in that
you can go and ask for things where previously you would just have
given up or thought it was a dead end. I think it has made a real
difference in giving you the opportunity to pursue things if you are
really intent on a particular issue or angle.
• Another journalist also noted how the Act had slightly changed his
relationship with ‘inside’ contacts. ‘Certainly contacts of mine have
said ‘you might want to put in a request for XYZ, so I suppose it’s
made a difference from that point of view, whereas previously
they’ve said ‘you won’t be able to see that material for 30 years.’
• Investigative journalists have said it is particularly useful in getting
hold of primary source material which would have previously been
unobtainable (Remember Nick Davies’ Leveson testimony).
Case studies
• Have a look at the BBC’s FOI page
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2006
/foi/default.stm
• Has the corporation’s requests contributed to
transparency of public bodies/greater public
information?
• Case study 2) Cost of policing the Iraq inquiry
• The Sun, March 18
• http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2
897730/Cops-Blair-Iraq-Inquiry-bill-273k.html
• Here is a summary of how the information was
released. Is the £273,000 figure accurate?:
• http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cost_
of_policing_for_iraq_inquir#incoming-75937
Case Study 3
• case study 3) Cost of employing translators by
immigration officers
• Daily Mail Oct 29 2008
• Here is an example of MPs working with newspapers –
in this case shadow police minister with the Daily Mail,
where the MP gets the information and the paper
publishes it:
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article1081644/Migrant-surge-pushes-police-translators22m.html
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Case Study 4
• Camerons’ Christmas card list November 2011 – fairly
frivolous – but revealed a lot about who was left off:
• ‘Argentina and the Dominican Republic make the cut,
but Peru and Venezuela do not. The prime minister of
Malawi is on the list, but South Africa's president Jacob
Zuma is not.
• France's president and prime minister both appear, as
do the heads of state and of government of Poland,
India and South Korea. But only Dmitry Medvedev, as
president of the Russian federation, makes the grade;
prime minister Vladimir Putin is conspicuous by his
absence.’
Is it worth it?
• A recent Justice Committee report concluded:
• The cost of freedom of information requests to central Government in
2005 was estimated at £35.5 million. The Constitution Unit estimated the
cost of freedom of information to local government at £31.6 million in
2010. Assessing the true cost of the freedom of information regime is also
difficult given that the benefits that arise from the right to access
information cannot usually be costed. Dr Ben Worthy, of the Constitution
Unit, told us:
• The difficulty is that people, particularly those at the top of organisations,
see transparency as something with concentrated costs and dispersed
benefits [...] one of the difficulties is seeing the benefits in concrete terms
in the same way that you can easily and quickly see the financial costs
and, in some cases, the political costs of openness. There may be a bias in
the discussion about how much FOI costs
• At a time when local authority budgets are squeezed is finding out
whether a council employed an exorcist the correct way to spend money?
Journalists’ response
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Several witnesses gave us examples of where money had been directly saved by
the exposure of inefficiency or poor practice.
David Hencke, Senior Investigative Journalist for ExaroNEWS told us about a recent
story he had broken which arose from a freedom of information request which
revealed that the head of the Student Loans Company was being paid through a
company rather than by his employer and was therefore paying a lower rate of tax:
"The general feeling is that the Lester case, frankly, was a complete fiddle. It was
the only known case of someone getting paid holidays and a pension who was
actually a company." Mr Hencke calculated that the revelations "saved the
taxpayer at least £26,000, if not £40,000" as Mr Lester's contract had been varied
as a result of the publicity, but that the consequent savings of the Government's
decision to cease payment of civil servants through companies saved much more.
Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, also highlighted the
deterrent effect of the greater level of transparency introduced by the Act: One of
the early freedom of information requests in Scotland revealed that councillors in
a particular authority were flying all over the world to go to flower shows—
spending £6,000 a trip to go to Tokyo for a flower show. That stopped the moment
FOI exposed it.
Over to you
• 1) Using the internet, either newspaper websites
and or/ FOI websites such as
www.whatdotheyknow.com find two news
stories that originated partly or wholly from FOI
requests.
• 2) Have there been any recent Kent-based FOI
stories? See if you can trace a few
• 3) If you were working for a Kent-based news
outlet, what kind of areas/issues might you look
at in terms of putting in an FOI request
Making requests and challenging
refusals
• To make a request, the first thing you need to know is
which bodies are covered by the Act. For a full list of bodies
covered by the Act, see www.foi.gov.uk/coverage.htm
• Before requesting information, it is usually worth checking
what information the authority has already published. In
particular, have a look at the authority’s ‘publication
scheme’. The Act requires every authority to have a
publication scheme and whether there are charges for it.
The schemes are approved by the Information
commissioner and are legally binding.
• Have a look at Kent, Medway websites: do they have an FOI
button and what happens when you press it?
How do I apply?
• A request should be made in writing: email,
letter or fax are valid; a request to a Scottish
authority made on voicemail may also be valid
• Send it to the authority’s FOI officer
• Authorities are required to provide reasonable
advice and assistance to anyone who has
made, or wants to make a request for
information
• Model letter handout