Evidence submitted by Centre for Corporate
Accountability
PROPOSED AMENDMENTS
TO FEE
SCHEDULES OF
FREEDOM OF
INFORMATION ACT
2000
We would like to give the Committee in this
letter further evidence of our concerns regarding these regulations.
This letter should be read as an addition to our original letter
to Lord Falconer on this matter dated 21 November 2006, which
is appended for your convenience.
We remain very concerned at the proposals by
the Government to amend the fee schedules of the Freedom of Information
Act 2000.
The Centre is a voluntary organisation partly
funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. The Centre runs
a "Work-Related Death Advice Service" which provides
free, independent and confidential advice to families bereaved
from a work-related death on investigation, prosecution and inquest
issues arising out of the death. Please find enclosed a copy of
the Centre's advice leaflet for your information. It also undertakes
research and policy work.
Should you wish to find out any more information
about our organisation then do not hesitate in contacting me.
POTENTIAL EFFECT
ON OUR
CASEWORK AND
POLICY WORK
OF THE
NEW REGULATIONS
Our main concern with these regulations is regulation
7, which provides that public authorities may aggregate requests
made under the Act in certain circumstances. Section 7(2)(b) sets
out two situations when FOIA requests can be aggregated; that
is when (i) those requests relate, to any extent, to the same
or similar information; or (ii) it is reasonable in all the circumstances
for the public authority to take account of the total costs of
complying with all of those requests.
Looking just at our casework, it is unlikely
that any requests that we undertake for multiple clients in any
60 day period would come foul of sub-section (i)—since each
request will be dealing with information relating to a separate
case. However we are concerned that, our applications could be
affected by the very wide wording in sub-section (ii). This is
for the following reasons.
1. State bodies treating all requests for
information as FOIA requests
We noted in our previous letter that it was
possible in our experience for a public authority to decide
to treat requests from bereaved families as Freedom of Information
requests falling under the Act even where this was not requested
or appropriate, meaning that it was not possible for us to determine
which or how many of our requests on behalf of clients (in casework)
or ourselves (in policy or research work) would be regarded as
requests under the Act. The HSE, the main body we deal with, sometimes
characterises requests we send in as FOIA requests even when we
do not see them in this way.
2. Combining our casework and policy work
Not only does the CCA make requests for information
on behalf of clients, we also at times make significant requests
for information to assist with our research and policy work. One
of our remits is monitoring the role of the HSE—and as a
result seeking information from them is an important part of our
work. We have produced several important research reports and
undertaken key campaigning on worker and public safety issues
that have partly resulted from FOIA requests, usually from the
Health and Safety Executive. These "policy" requests
can be more complicated than casework requests, and therefore
potentially more likely to bring us to the point where a public
authority aggregating our requests decide not to respond any more
in a given period, but are equally important to our work. We are
worried that in order to try and ensure we are able to do FOIA
requests for our clients, we might have to decrease or stop our
FOIA requests for policy or research work.
We also explained that we put in requests on
behalf of clients who are often too distressed to manage this
sort of correspondence themselves, and that we feared that we
would have to refuse to do this work for some clients if our "quota"
of requests under the Act (FOIA requests) had already been filled
for a given time period. It would be unacceptable if some of our
clients were able to get help with this and some were not.
We do not believe that it is fair, necessary
or democratic to put such a "chilling" effect on our
activities in this way, especially when the people most likely
to directly suffer as a result are our bereaved clients who may
not feel able to undertake FOIA requests on their own behalf.
We think this effect would extend to many organisations that provide
advice and assistance to vulnerable members of the public, especially
where such organisations also have any kind of research or policy
function that might utilise FOIA requests.
In addition, we have a broader point for opposing
these regulations. There are a number of organisations working
broadly on issues of safety and corporate accountability—but
we are probably the most specialist of these, and work effectively
by obtaining information from state bodies dealing with safety.
We therefore tend to make more research and policy FOIA applications
than other similar safety organisations—but the information
obtained will be of interest to the much wider community of bereaved
relatives, campaigners and others interested in health and safety.
More generally we believe that the public accountability
of state bodies will be seriously undermined if these regulations
prevent journalists, researchers, campaign groups and private
individuals from accessing information, that the current Act enables
them to have. We have heard no pressing cost or other reasons
for such a drastic curtailment of the rights to information as
threatened by these regulations.
We would therefore urge the Committee to advise
the DCA against proceeding with these regulations, which are against
the spirit in which the Act was adopted, and which could so profoundly
increase the opacity in governance it was intended to remove.
Bethan Rigby
February 2007
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