Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-152)
DEPUTY CHIEF
CONSTABLE IAN
READHEAD, CHIEF
INSPECTOR PAUL
BROOKS, DR
LYDIA POLLARD
AND TRACY
PHILLIPS
28 MARCH 2006
Q140 Dr Whitehead: All of you to
some extent have addressed this question but, when you last gave
evidence to the Committee, or rather when three of you gave evidence
to the Committee, really before matters had started, you did raise
concerns about whether authorities in your sector would adopt
different approaches, I think particularly concerning the police.
For example, whether some authorities might answer in a different
way to others and therefore would be subject to, as it were, people
then reprising their requests to other authorities to try to tease
things out. Has that actually happened, in terms of the first
year's experience?
DCC Ian Readhead: Certainly from
the Police Service, yes, there has. What we have done is additional
training to try to get consistency across the service as to the
way in which exemptions are used, so that everybody is using the
Act with some consistency. We think that has certainly had some
harvest in relation to ensuring that the service, in its outward-looking
response to the public, is doing things with some conformity.
I think that I have said before that it would be absurd, would
it not, if one applicant writes to Dorset and gets one kind of
response, but writes to Hampshire and gets another one? Certainly
we are really keen to enhance the capability of the service to
be able professionally to respond in that arena.
CI Paul Brooks: Certainly we have
seen across the services where a requester will—we have
had experience in the first few months—apply to 15 police
forces, asking the same questions, making sure that each police
force never touched each other's border; then, 20 days later,
asked another 15, and carried on in that way. The Central Referral
Process that we have set up will try to answer and gain ACPO advice,
because ACPO works in a way that the deputy chief constable or
the chief constable of one force will give advice to all forces.
Therefore that is what we do. We go to that ACPO lead and then
advise all forces, "This is what the ACPO lead says".
It has been surprising that, even with that method, reporters
will ask one force, get a response, and then will shove it through
to six or seven forces and say, "Here is a precedent you
must follow". That happens quite regularly, but the Central
Referral Process does actually pick quite a lot of that up. The
thing we are showing is that a number of forces do not want to
release material, but the ACPO lead is saying, "No, release
it". We generally give guidance saying, "No, let that
go" and we do push people. There is more pushing people to
release than not to release.
DCC Ian Readhead: My final concern
would be that some of my colleagues at chief constable level,
as we have said in our evidence, still have not been open about
their expenses. That really worries me.
Q141 Chairman: They have not been
able to . . . ?
DCC Ian Readhead: They have not
been open. They have not published their expenses. That sets a
tone for the force. Clearly, against that backdrop, in that particular
area, you wonder about the difficulties for the officer who has
been positioned to deal with FOI issues being as open as perhaps
they would want to be. I hope that in the next 12 months you see
that position rectified.
Q142 Keith Vaz: But if they do not
publish their expenses and someone puts in an application, they
have to be published, do they not?
DCC Ian Readhead: That is correct,
sir.
Q143 Chairman: It would take an appeal
to the Commissioner to enforce it, if they do not listen to you.
DCC Ian Readhead: That is correct,
sir.
CI Paul Brooks: The Commissioner
is of the opinion, every time we have an appeal to the Commissioner,
they will automatically search to see if any other police force
has released it in the first place and, if they have, that gets
sent straight back, saying why you should be releasing it.
Q144 Dr Whitehead: What about consistency
of response from local authorities? You mentioned, Ms Phillips,
that to some extent it is an issue of networking in terms of providing
that consistency.
Tracy Phillips: That is absolutely
how it is. It is a matter of networking with every other FOI practitioner
within local authorities, to see how they are answering a response
and whether it is a consistent response approach. We are left
to our own devices. There is no one there, providing support for
us.
Q145 Dr Whitehead: You would appreciate,
perhaps, a system more akin to the method the police are adopting?
Tracy Phillips: Yes, very much
so.
Lydia Pollard: But there are no
resources available to provide that service. There is some evidence.
I think in the environmental health reports there was some inconsistency
certainly in what was disclosed. It is really the interpretation
of exemptions that causes the issues. Different authorities will
interpret them differently and that will lead to discussions about
how they have been interpreted, but, until there is some case-law
established, tribunal cases coming out and decision notices about
it, it is likely to continue.
Q146 Dr Whitehead: Have you noticed
any evidence of the sort of precedent-setting inquiries of particular
authorities that we have heard mentioned this afternoon, which
in the case of the police have been to some extent tempered by
discussions between forces but perhaps less so as far as local
authorities are concerned?
Lydia Pollard: It is less so as
far as local authorities are concerned because there is no one
organisation in charge of them, they are very much independent,
and so it is very much informal agreements. The London authorities
have an FOI group and they will take requests that are of concern
and they will discuss with others and ask advice about how to
handle it and there will be some consensus there. Similarly, there
are other local networks that do that, but there is no national
network that does that, and so you are likely to feel, although
I have not necessarily seen this, that different areas could take
a different response.
Q147 Dr Whitehead: Turning to the
length of time for a response, we have heard already this afternoon,
and on other occasions, that some requests have been subject to
lengthy delays. I think this is particularly a question I would
direct to Dr Pollard. Have those sorts of delays occurred within
local authorities and to what extent, if those delays have occurred,
do you think the public interest test has been applied by those
people thinking about how quickly to respond to requests?
Lydia Pollard: There have been
delays on requests. I am not aware that they have been huge delays.
Obviously, on certain individual ones there have been long delays,
but, on the whole, I think that there have been relatively few
delays. Part of the reason has been the public interest test.
There have been some problems, particularly in small authorities,
with procedural aspects. In fact, a number of the ones that went
to the Information Commissioner were concerned with procedural
aspects. They just did not realise what they were supposed to
do and people had sat on them and perhaps not responded as quickly.
One of the big issues is just finding the information. Local authorities
are still working on records management, the vast majority still
do not have a corporate records management system, they have a
mix, and finding information in a manual system takes a considerable
amount of time.
Q148 Dr Whitehead: Has the fact that
you have a better system in the police force, one might say, of
comparing requests meant an overall lengthening in the time taken
to respond, or has it made the procedure of responding more effective,
in your view?
DCC Ian Readhead: We have been
relatively pleased with the compliance with the time-frames, but
the emphasis we have always said is: if you are going to be somewhat
longer, it is better to have a quantitative answer than one that
you rush through and then you do not comply with the legislation
or which you could potentially prejudice because you have not
redacted the documents correctly. Clearly, there are some complicated
matters which we deal with, but what we have attempted to do using
best practice is to keep the applicant well informed about why
the delay is occurring, giving clear time-frames as to when you
expect the document to be fully released, but overall, 94% of
the time we are within the time-frames, and we are pleased with
that.
Q149 Chairman: We have received evidence
that in the Commissioner's Office there has had to be some transfer
of staff from the guidance and management functions, and possibly
even some of the other general work, into dealing with cases due
to the backlog. Have you noticed an effect from that or have you
been reasonably comfortable with the quality of decision notices
and the guidance that has been issued?
Lydia Pollard: I think local authorities
have noticed that. Under the Data Protection Act local authorities
were able to go and ask the Information Commissioner's Office
for advice about how to deal with a particular request, and they
would get informal advice, which usually they would take notice
of, about how to deal with something of which they were not quite
sure. When they have done the same under Freedom of Information
they have not received that informal guidance. They have been
advised that the Information Commissioner's Office was not able
to give that guidance because it might prejudice a complaint.
Q150 Chairman: They are given a theoretical
reason rather than saying, "We are too busy at the moment"?
Lydia Pollard: Yes, they have
been given that reason, and the guidance has been slow to come
out. For example, there has been a meeting between Defra and the
Information Commissioner's Office and local authorities about
joining up the guidance for FOI and EIR, but we are still waiting
for some definitive statements which were requested back in January—they
were requested before that but they were formally requested in
January—and so the information that is coming out is quite
slow. The information about how to deal with vexatious requests
has also been very slow in coming out. That only came out in January
again, so we have gone a whole year, so it has taken time.
DCC Ian Readhead: I think our
relationship with the Information Commissioner has perhaps been
more positive than that. It would be fair to record that we have
received significant support from Richard Thomas and his staff
over the last year. I think the difficulty is in the area of appeals.
Twenty-seven appeals went to the Information Commissioner's Office
in 2005. Only 10 of those have actually received adjudication.
The oldest one goes back to March 2005 concerning registered sex
offenders, so I would suspect it is in that particular area that
we would say the Information Commissioner has his greatest challenge.
Q151 Chairman: You are more concerned
about the backlog than the secondary effective attempts to deal
with it?
DCC Ian Readhead: Yes.
Q152 Chairman: Thank you very much.
We are very grateful to you for coming to give evidence this afternoon.
Parliament is often told that it ought to look at the effects
of legislation, not just the making and framing of it. We would
like to have had you along at both stages of the process. Thank
you very much.
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