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The Freedom of Information Officer’s Handbook by Paul Gibbons was published by Facet Publishing in January 2019. Readers of this blog can order copies direct from the publisher with a 30% discount (so it will only cost you £45.45) by emailing info(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)facetpublishing.co.uk and quoting the code FOIBLOG30 (do not supply payment card or bank account details by email). The publisher’s distributor will then contact you to arrange payment and discuss despatch instructions.
Understanding Modern Government courses - Paul Gibbons (FOIMan) will be delivering/chairing the following training courses for Understanding Modern Government in the coming months. Further details and booking information can be found on the Understanding Modern Government website.
A cost-effective way to train your employees in information rights, delivered by a recognised expert. Paul Gibbons provides in-house training courses in:
Paul can provide other support in these areas including review of policies and procedures, and conducting records surveys and data protection audits. Find out more about FOIMan training and other services.
Paul Gibbons has two decades of information management experience in the UK Parliament, Greater London Authority, Pfizer, the NHS, local government and higher education. Best known for his FOIMan blog, he also writes for the Freedom of Information Journal and has featured in the Daily Telegraph, Times Higher Education and on BBC Radio.
Important note: Paul is not a lawyer, so nothing said here, on Twitter, or in correspondence, should be taken as legal advice.
Safe space under threat?
An FOIMan info-graphic.
Last week an FOI Commission was set up by the government, and one of its aims is to consider “whether the operation of the Act adequately recognises the need for a ‘safe space’ for policy development…”. The section 35 exemption described in the last Exemption Index post can only be used by central government and it is designed for exactly that purpose. The Commission may find the image above helpful in reaching a judgment.
Incidentally, the three decisions that were overturned were refusals to disclose:
Civil servants who fear their advice to Ministers on important current issues will be disclosed are overestimating the power of FOI…
Update (27 July 2015)
The post above was a bit of an experiment, prepared in a hurry. It was only afterwards that I realised that the figures here are just the tip of the iceberg.
If you look at the Ministry of Justice’s annual reports on government FOI performance, you can see how many FOI requests were received by the Cabinet Office over a comparable period (it would be difficult to directly correlate the two sets of statistics, but for these purposes the five year period 2010-2014 should be close enough). You can also see how many times the Cabinet Office applied the section 35 exemption over this period:
Year |Requests received|s.35 used
2010 1176 75
2011 1679 115
2012 1607 103
2013 1759 79
2014 1660 111
Total 7881 483
In other words, the use of the exemption for policy development and formulation, protecting the safe space which the government believes to be under threat, went unchallenged 93% of the time. The three cases that the Commissioner overturned represent approximately 0.6% of the use of s.35 by the Cabinet Office. (Taking into account the partially overturned cases, it rises to 1.5%).
I should also say that the reason I selected the Cabinet Office was that they use this exemption more than any other government department.
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