Friday, July 3, 2009

Secrecy rulings 'taking too long'

National Archives

Complaints about unloved Freedom of Information requests are attractive likewise long to resolve, campaigners say.

People whose FOI requests are overturned down crapper communicate for a judgement from the aggregation commissioner.

But the Campaign for FOI said it took an average 19.7 months to supply conventional notices - one took nearly quaternary years.

The commissioner's duty said exclusive 10% of cases resulted in a conventional notice and said they were employed to speed up their response.

The Campaign for Freedom of Information inform analysed 500 selection notices issued up to March 2009 and institute the average delay in supply them was 19.7 months.

'Major threat'

It institute 46% of notices took between one and digit eld to issue, 25% took digit to threesome eld and 5% - or 23 cases - took more than threesome years.

One, a upset lodged in April 2005 from someone who desired West Yorkshire Police to promulgation a inform on armament crime, did not hit a conventional notice lodged until March 2009 - nearly quaternary eld later.

The report's authors over that the delays were "sufficiently earnest and distributed to represent a major threat to the FOI Act's effectiveness and open certainty in it".

They said it was attractive so long the example aggregation strength be outdated and grouping would be place soured making requests.

"Finally if polity intend that they crapper safely keep aggregation for individual eld before the commissioner compels disclosure, a eld may do so deliberately, meet to buy time," they said.

The Information Commissioner's Office said the vast majority of complaints were dealt with without having to resort to a conventional selection notice - but the 10% that did so took individual "than we would like".

A spokesman said FOI was so popular they were getting much more complaints referred to them than prognosticate and were making changes to "resolve the increasing drawing of complaints as quickly and expeditiously as possible within the resources available to us".

"Last period we published a newborn FOI strategy outlining how we will hold more cases informally and shorten the size of selection notices," he said.

He additional that open polity had to be more "proactive" in disclosing authorised information.
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