New mySociety Report on Freedom of Information in Local Government

Here’s a very good report on the state of FOI and local government in the UK by Alex Parsons and Rebecca Rumbul at mySociety-see it here. 

 

The Executive summary and my Foreward are below.

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Freedom of information is a significant legal instrument in the UK – but currently very little is currently understood about how councils cope with this sometimes significant workload. While central government Freedom of Information (FOI) statistics are well covered by the Cabinet Office series, there is no equivalent picture for local government. The goal of this research was to construct a more detailed picture of FOI at the local level, to understand how many requests were being sent, how much internal visibility exists over the status of requests, and calculate the contribution of requests made through WhatDoTheyKnow to the total number of requests made overall.

This research is based on two sets of FOI Requests made to local authorities and an anonymous survey of FOI officers. The report aims to provide a clear illustration of the current scale and operational approach to FOI in local government. The key conclusions are:

• Approximately 467,000 FOI requests were sent to local government in 2017. This almost doubles a previous estimate of the number of FOI Requests sent to local government.
• Councils have relatively universal records on the number of requests received, and time taken to reply – but have fewer records on the volume of information disclosed, or on the status of appeals.
• Approximately 35%-50% of internal reviews in local government result in a change to the original outcome.
• Staff responsible for the administration of FOI in local government tend to hold FOI as one responsibility among several.
• FOI teams tend to be embedded in larger teams with few staff solely working on FOI. As such, FOI administration rarely appears as a specific budget item. Staffing levels devoted to FOI appear to increase in correlation with an increase in the volume of FOI Requests received.
• Most councils (66%) use some form of case management system, however there is no standard or universally adopted software for FOI case management, and the quality and operability of these systems varies significantly between local authorities.
• Most councils (64%) do not publish a disclosure log. Councils that receive higher numbers of FOI Requests requests are more likely to publish a log, but accounting for other drivers of reports, there is no positive or negative effect of publishing a log.
• Replicating this exercise every year would be prohibitively difficult, however a centralised repository of the statistics disclosures required by the new code of practice would make tracking change over time (over a sector or individual authority) more straightforward and unlock more value from those disclosures.

Foreword by Dr. Ben Worthy (Birkbeck College): 

Freedom of information is local. Although it is often national scandals that grab the headlines, most FOI use is at the local level. Our research at the Constitution Unit back in 2010 in the UK found that almost 80% of requests go to local government. This makes sense, given that most political participation and activity is at the level of town halls rather than Westminster. All this local use means we have to re-think and remember what FOI is for. It may be less about MPs’ expenses and more about street lights, fixing roads and the micro-politics of our changing the nearby area. The real value of FOI, as one Scottish Information Commissioner put it, is to be found in the pages of local newspapers.

The landscape of local government and FOI has also been a changing one. Our surveys of local government and FOI between 2005 and 2010 found that the requests numbers were very large and growing. In the space of five years, we found requests to local government jumped from 60,000 in 2005 to 197,000 in 2010. We also felt, based on our interviews and other anecdotal evidence, that this may have been a considerable underestimate. Despite this huge jump in numbers, we also found that local government learned to deal more effectively with requests, more than halving the estimated time spent on them.

Since 2010, when our surveys ended, we have known little about what’s happening. Councils are dealing with years of huge and deep cuts that have meant the loss of both resources and experienced staff. The government’s recent revised Code around FOI has promised local government data on FOI requests, and a few have begun to publish them aleady. But aside from these changes, that may take time, local government and FOI is hidden from us.

This is why this report is so welcome. It gives us a first comprehensive picture of what’s happening with FOI at the local level. It shows that requests numbers have indeed continued to grow and that local authority staff face a series of obstacles in dealing with requests. Above all, it underlines the importance of FOI as a tool of local democracy.

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United Kingdom End-of-Term Report 2016-2018 – For Public Comment

In 2019, the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) (including me) published the end of term report for the United Kingdom’s third action plan. The report covers the full action plan implementation period of October 2017 through May 2018. The version of the report for public comment is available here. The two-week public comment period will remain open from 12 April 2019 until close of business on 26 April 2019.

Read it, download and feedback here.

You can read about the report ‘The UK’s Third NAP Mid-Term Report: Events, Evolution and (Un)evenness’ here.

FOI Man: What we don’t know about FOI

Freedom of Information

Here’s some interesting thoughts from FOI man on what we don’t know about FOI

It’s tempting to assume that 18 years after the Freedom of Information Act (‘FOIA’) became law, we know everything about its application. Practitioners could be excused for believing that — although they themselves don’t know the answer to every FOI query that might arise — they aren’t more than a few decision notices or tribunal decisions away from knowing. Yet this isn’t the case. As with most laws, there are questions about FOIA’s interpretation that have never been asked, let alone answered. 

Read it here