Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 30)
TUESDAY 20 MARCH 2007
ROB EVANS
AND TIM
JONES
Q20 Chairman: What is your response
to the Lord Chancellor's claim, for which he gives some examples,
that there are frivolous or silly but time-consuming requests—how
many windows there are, or how many toilets there are in the department,
or whatever it may be?
Rob Evans: How many Ferrero Rocher
chocolates were given us?
Q21 Chairman: Yes.
Rob Evans: I think, if you look
at the bigger picture, the number of so-called frivolous requests
are tiny. That is using a small number of requests to tarnish
and write-off the whole of the Act. There may be a few, but the
point here is that the Freedom of Information Act is really quite
young and we are settling down. You may get a few silly requests,
but the more that the public learn about the Act and how to use
the Act, the better the working of the Act and the more people
will put in focused requests, and that will not waste so much
time.
Q22 Chairman: Was there not a lady
who inquired how many unmarried police officers there were in
the local constabulary! Would you say the process can deal with
that anyway?
Rob Evans: I think so. I do not
see it as an insuperable problem.
Q23 Bob Neill: You made the point,
both of you, about the need sometimes to go back because one question
leads on to another question and you need more information. Can
you give us any sense as to what percentage of the requests that
you make trigger the need to go back for more because either they
were minimal in terms of their compliance or because, very legitimately,
what they have said raises yet another question in your mind?
Tim Jones: I think the main kinds
of requests like that tend to be when we have got a particular
strategy of doing that, so when we would ask for a list of certain
kinds of projects and then look through it and think: which are
the most interesting ones? There was a case where we wanted to
follow up on some evidence that we had that DFID were working
alongside USAID on projects and, when they were doing that, that
meant the aid money that DFID was contributing was tied to being
spent on US companies. As you may know, DFID are not meant to
tie their aid to be used by UK companies, but we thought it might
be that some UK aid was being tied to US companies. So we initially
put in the request for where they were working with USAID and
then sought to establish which ones of these might be the cases
where there is this tied aid going on? Where we have had follow
up requests, it has tended to be in that kind of strategic way
and I think that is how the Act was meant to be used. There is
no way under the regulations at the moment to ask for all you
want initially, so you have got to get lists in order to then
pare it down to the cases that would be most interesting.
Rob Evans: We do ask for an appeal
on a large number of our requests, because we have come across
quite a lot of instances of unjustified secrecy. The more times
you appeal, the further you go, the better chance you have of
getting the information.
Q24 Bob Neill: That raises another
point. How satisfied are you with the robustness and the fairness
of the appeals procedure?
Rob Evans: You mean the Information
Commissioner.
Q25 Bob Neill: Yes. Does that seem
to work—some you win, some you lose?
Rob Evans: Well, yes, it is a
case of some you win—yes. The problem with the Information
Commissioner is that it takes a long time to get results.
Q26 Bob Neill: So that is your main
concern?
Rob Evans: Yes.
Q27 Bob Neill: That was the only
other point I was going to come to as regards that. We have heard
the argument that the Lord Chancellor makes about the burden on
politicians. What do you estimate to be the burden upon yourselves
or your organisation in terms of the resource that you have to
put into making and following up these requests? Is it five minutes
first thing in the morning or is it a bit more resource than that?
Tim Jones: We are an organisation
that employs about 20 staff and I co-ordinate all our requests.
It takes up a significant amount of my time, and a lot of the
time I think that is probably why we have not followed up and
appealed on some of these because I just do not have the time
to think it through and there are other things to be done. Yes,
putting percentages on it, 10, 20% of my time sometimes has been
spent on trying to use the Act, but which I wish it could be more
really.
Q28 Chairman: I was struck by the
point you made earlier. Effectively what you said was that you
had to submit a more elaborate series of requests because the
department was not going to answer the question that you really
wanted answered. That sounds as though the Government's way of
responding to requests makes the process more expensive. Is that
so?
Tim Jones: Initially when the
Act came in, I went to training courses and had this concept that
I could build up a relationship with the freedom of information
people in order that I would just be able to phone them up and
say, "This is what I really want. Can you get it for me?"
That has not been my experience at all. When I have tried that,
it has just been point blank: "Write it down. We will see
what we can do." So there we have had to take a step back,
and that equates with the US. We knew that there was no way—.
If we asked for all the documents about all the cases where they
were working with USAID, we would get back straight away: "It
will cost too much money to find this." So we have to first
try and get a list and then work out which ones look like they
might be the most interesting.
Q29 Chairman: Is there a question
you could have produced there which, if the Government had been
more willing, would have cut the amount of time and money that
they were committed to and would have achieved your purpose?
Tim Jones: Yes, the question would
have been: "Where are you working with USAID where UK aid
might be being tied to the US by US companies?"
Q30 Chairman: A perfectly straightforward
question.
Tim Jones: I think initially in
that case I might have tried that one, and they just said, "Our
filing system cannot cope with that. We do not know. It would
take an investigation by us", and I have got lots of other
problems with learning about how the DFID filing system works.
I am worried about how they keep track of things! There was no
willingness on their part, and, of course, obviously it is a politically
contentious question because this has been a major thing that
the Government has proposed, how they de-link aid money from being
tied to companies, and so this idea that there might still be
being tied aid going on was a very political question and so they
would not have a political reason to want to investigate it.
Chairman: Mr Jones, Mr Evans, thank you
very much indeed.
| 
