Misuse of the FOI legislation

[Nexti]

I work for the NHS (I’ve also spent a large proportion of my day bitching about this so I’ve name changed)

Over the last 12 months we have been swamped with FOI requests which have no tangible benefit to the public. 99% of them are just fishing expeditions for sales information.

ie - how many patients did this department treat in the last 10 years and how many of them used this piece of equipment and how many bits of equipment do you own and how often do you renew your contracts for this equipment and what band of people decide that and what hours do they work and what are their job titles

and it goes on and on and on

The trust has a really high bar on rejecting any requests so we have hours and hours of wasted time trying to answer these ridiculous requests which have probably been sent to every trust in the country

sorry this is a bit niche but I can’t be the only person who would happily tighten the rules up to stop this nonsense

Yes, I think that people did not anticipate these mechanisms being used in this particular way.

I've also seen where they can be used essentially to overwhelm a small department.

More generally, I think after many years of trying to create true accessibility of differernt kinds, for information, services, benefits, we are starting to see some downsides, or problems associated with it.

If there isn't a strong sense inculcated into people of the importance of using these mechanisms responsibly, people will take advantage or in some cases just behave in an entitled way that makes these systems increasingly overwhelmed.

I thought I read some years ago that Tony Blair admitted that this was a poor piece of legislation and was never designed for this and that it was something he regretted. Or WTTE

FOI is the biggest waste of public money there is. The amount of time and energy spent producing information for journalists, sales people, nosy people and just people with too much time on their hands costs a fortune. Last week I spent 2 days on processing FOI request that I could have spent doing my day job.

I doubt theres any way to claw it back now. People would be up in arms that the government are trying to hide things.

I work for a university and we also get lots of FOI requests, some of which I absolutely think are timewasting nonsense. My 'favourite' are the ones that are blatantly trying to find out if we're doing something 'woke', which are pretty frequent. I used to think they came from Daily Mail journalists or something but have now realised they're just random people who want to froth on Twitter.

Cheeky question but for those who have to spend their time doing these, what happens if you just make up the information and send it out. Who is going to know?

Yes this was done to my DC's primary school by a disgruntled parent. Such an appalling waste of time.

I work for a council and we have the same problem. We manage the buildings and all our FOIs fall into two categories- companies wanting information so they can quote for works or get a contact they can harrass while pushing their product, or friends of councillors/the press wanting info they can use against political rivals.None of this is in the best interest of the taxpayer.

FOIs are a waste of time with our resources stretched beyond breaking point just trying to do our real jobs. There are rules around which ones we can refuse to answer, but these should be stronger.

It's really not worth the risk that my employer ends up legal trouble and I end up sacked! Plus I do agree with the broad principle of FOI - and while I daydream about a mechanism where we could just say 'oh this one is nonsense, I'm not doing it', I do see that we can't really have a system where I get to be sole and final arbiter of what are worthy requests!

I would be dismissed immediately if it was clear I had made information up. Accidently getting information wrong would be a written warning at the least.

Yup. We are the same. It's just so much effort and we have to employ 3 people to respond to FOI

FOI is such a drain on resources.

We once had a nosey (retired, at home all day) neighbour who lived near the council office. Any time he spotted anything slightly unusual through his net curtains, an foi email would arrive a couple of hours later. It became a hobby for him 🙄

In the end though I think it will always come down to someone deciding what requests are valid and what are bollocks. Which means at some level there needs to be trust in the person making the call.

I'm not sure we have that around many of these positions now though. Similarly to ombudsmen. Great idea, until they are compromised too.

Agree - I work for a uni and they’re all either journalists who don’t want to pay for data, sales, or disgruntled ex-students. Boils my piss frankly.

I absolutely loathe the obvious marketing ones. They’re a fundamental misunderstanding of how public procurement works, you can’t just rock up with a thing and say ‘buy my thing, it’s really good!’

I hate the ‘woke’ trawling. They’re mostly from one particular journalist who has a massive axe to grind. No idea why.

The other ones I can’t stand are the ones for information which is clearly available on the website. Or that have been sent to every authority or every NHS trust or whatever.

But as an area of law, i enjoy it, it pays me a good salary and I LOVE drafting a good refusal!

Why do you think journalists should have to ‘pay for data’?

Maybe if public institutions and authorities published data in a much more transparent way instead of trying to suppress it, those pesky journalists and, shock horror, local residents, wouldn’t have to go through the FOI system to obtain it.

This is public money we’re talking about. People, whoever they are, should be able to see how that money’s being spent. It’s incredibly disappointing, but not surprising at all, to see people charged with fulfilling FOI requests acting against the spirit of the legislation, not understanding it’s huge public interest.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

It is being misused. Just having a browse through recent ones to my council - someone has asked how many reports of paranormal activity there have been to the council in the last 10 years. Who you gonna call?! Council Ghostbusters!

In the spirit of the thread, my very niche pet peeve is requests that get sent to all UK councils on an England only matter. Surely devolved nations should be allowed to ignore those.

I also work in the NHS and deal with FOIs. They are a pain in the arse. About 90% are from private healthcare fishing for info because they want contracts/sales.

The rest from members of the public who ask the most woolly questions that are impossible to answer like "how many patients have you treated for pain in the last 5 years". I mean where do you even start with that?

Why shouldn’t they pay? They’d get official data, a spec which is accurate and interpreted the same way for every uni, with expert advice based on what they’re trying to show, and quite cheap (from a few hundred quid). Rather than email 150 unis, who may interpret what you ask in a slightly different way to other unis, taking up several hours of staff time per uni -
maybe 5 hours per request x 150 unis = 750 hours at £20 an hour.

Edited to add: for any journalists out there - please check out HESA first, then UCAS, then DiscoverUni - there’s a wealth of freely available informative data available if you just make a bit of effort.

If the information is already in the public domain you just provide them with a link as per the exemptions

friends of councillors/the press wanting info they can use against political rivals

Don't forget people with an axe to grind, either because they don't like paying council tax, or they're a one issue campaigner of some kind.

And the complete nutters (Freemen of the Land types)...

Journalists are exactly those who should be given information by government, agencies, law enforcement, the NHS, regulators and the like. I can’t see the issue with that at all. If the information is openly available elsewhere presumably that’s all you need to say.

But I can imagine that hobbyists and activists are a pain.

IIRC Blair’s remorse about FOI was mostly about the pressure it created for central government to cough up information. Linked to the courts’ disapproval of civil servants’ contrived reasons for withholding information.

I work in this area.
We have stopped answering any that clearly have a commercial objective or are just lazy journalists casting around for a non story.
Noone has ever complained which tells me our judgement is right.
There simply isn't the resources to answer these

Similarly a few times I had other public sector bodies using FOI requests to try and find out how we do things - I developed a telling off email that invited them to use other channels for collaborative information sharing. They stopped sending requests.

If a question is getting asked a lot - just publish the data and then you can refer them to your website.

This is on your FOI team to apply the rules with some pragmatism.

Ahhh the freemen of the land are my favourites.

We have a webpage now (so do a lot of public sector bodies) that basically tells them to go away. We just direct them to that repeatedly.