1 Introduction
1. The Freedom of Information (FOI) Act came into
force fully on 1 January 2005. It gives people the right of access
to information held by over 100,000 public authorities across
the UK. The new Environmental Information Regulations (EIR), which
provide a separate access regime for environmental information,
also came into force on the same date. The EIR apply to a wider
range of organisations and there are fewer exceptions to disclosure,
but, as with FOI, the Information Commissioner has the powers
to promote and enforce them.
2. A number of foreign jurisdictions including Australia,
New Zealand, Canada, and USA have had FOI legislation in place
for many years. However, statutes differ in the way that they
have implemented the basic right of access to information and
so it was difficult to predict the UK's likely experience during
the first year of implementation. Some of the particular aspects
of the UK implementation are that:
- it was implemented across all
public bodies simultaneously (the 'big bang' approach) after a
four year preparation period;
- it is fully retrospective;
- there is no requirement to cite the Act in an
information request;
- there is no fee for making a request, for making
a complaint to the Information Commissioner, or for an appeal
to the Information Tribunal.
All of these factors were considered likely to contribute
to a relatively higher volume of requests and complaints in the
first year.
3. In our previous report on FOI published in December
2004,[1] we concluded that
the state of readiness of the public sector for FOI was patchy.
We conducted the current inquiry in order to examine the first
year's experience of FOI and to consider the impact which it had
made. The terms of reference were to assess:
- The role of the Information
Commissioner in providing guidance, issuing decisions and participating
in Information Tribunals;
- Requesters' experiences of the first year of
FOI implementation;
- Public authorities' experiences of the first
year of FOI implementation; and
- The role of the Department for Constitutional
Affairs (DCA) in providing central guidance, including the operation
of the central government clearing house.
4. We took oral evidence from the Lord Chancellor,
Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the Information Commissioner, Richard
Thomas, the DCA Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Baroness
Ashton of Upholland, the Chief Executive of the National Archives,
Natalie Ceeney, and representatives of requesters and public authorities.
The Committee also visited the offices of the Information Commissioner
in Wilmslow and the Scottish Information Commissioner in St. Andrews.
1 Constitutional Affairs Committee, First Report of
Session 2004-05, Freedom of Information Act 2000 - Progress
Towards Implementation, HC 79-I & II Back
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