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

Journalists investigating a proper story- absolutely
Lazy "journalism" where they spam multiple public bodies in the hope of creating some regurgitated click bait- absolutely not

And actually of course activists etc have a right to it - far more than lazy click bait journalism, activists often bring about genuine change and scrutiny. I've seen this have a powerful effect and it's one of the reasons I feel FOI is important and run a very pro-disclosure practice

Just tell the FOI team to say no to both those categories. Have a good and transparent procurement page and the FOI team can direct them there each time with a standard response

Yes! Some of them are so vague and poorly written it's beyond pathetic. We send a lot of requests back asking for clarification of what the hell they actually mean.

I find that odd. Journalists’ stories may be bigger or smaller. They may have a solid story or be looking for one. But they are at least doing a proper job informing the public. They have editors, subs and legal departments. (I’m talking about mainstream journalists and writers, not ‘citizen journalists’ with their pathetic badly-written blogs.)

Activists are usually just tedious obsessives. Members of the public with a genuine reason for knowing about an issue that affects them aren’t what I would call activists.

You obviously havent seen some of the "journalist" requests we get or how they are used - they will just spam public bodies lazily. It's the equivalent of trawling Mumsnet and making up stories. If it seems like genuine journalism of course we answer it

Whereas a friend actually managed to use FOI to reveal a big scandal and get massive change to sort it in her local area. So local activists/concerned citizens can be amazing

Wow this is depressing. It shouldn’t matter who is asking. You shouldn’t be making judgements on whether to release information based on the identity of the person asking. You should be simply asking whether there is a strong public interest reason for withholding the data. IMO most of the stuff I am sent via FOI should be readily available to the public online anyway.

And trust me, the lazy journalists are absolutely not sending off FOI requests to multiple institutions, interpreting that huge amount of data and then turning it into a story. The very few lazy journalists left are sitting on FB regurgitating rage bait and turning it into ‘stories’.

Everyone whose ever been through an HR investigative process now seems to submit a FOI after the event.

Do you mean a DSAR? Now that’s a wasteful and stupid process that’s routinely abused.

When you have very limited resources you have to make judgement calls.
I have never had a single complaint about the ones we don't respond to,.which shows they know they are on ropey ground. If they asked for an internal review we would revisit.

and I reckon at least 90% of similar public bodies also take the same approach to spammy requests- based on the stories they then churn out

Noone can afford a team of hundreds just to indulge the whims of commercial companies looking for work or" journalists" on a fishing mission for some trite click bait

Yep, NHS here and we use hours each week answering these. It detracts from patient care, is mostly industry trying to gain sales info or journalists casting a net for a moan piece about the NHS (which we know is in a hell of a mess). Made much harder now that our CCGs have become one ICB so pulling data (or determining that it doesn't exist) from 6 places is hugely time consuming! Sometimes the info can be found from a quick Google and other times it simply has never been collected.

Don't forget those wonderful people from "The Taxpayers Alliance" sending massive round robin FOIs to every council in the country, usually in my experience about things that the council already publish.

Same, plus people who are obviously trying to get hold of patient confidential information via the back door. They ask very specific questions which, if answered, would immediately identify someone. I don’t work at the Royal Marsden but I’ll bet the house that when it became known that the Princess of Wales was treated there for cancer, they were inundated with FOI requests which were designed to elicit information about her condition that was not publicly known, how many times she visited, the names of her care team etc. These won’t been answered, but the team will have had to process them, acknowledge them and quote the relevant clauses that cover them for not answering.

Thankfully the local organisations I put FOI requests into don’t appear to take your approach and adhere to both the law, and the spirit of the law. When my requests are refused (very rarely) I do ask for a review and I’ve always been successful, apart from once when the ICO ruled in my favour.

The requests might be ‘spammy’ to you, but journalists simply wouldn’t bother putting in the requests if our readers weren’t interested in the results. Like you, we’re similarly under-resourced. Thankfully it’s not actually up to FOI officers to decide what’s newsworthy and what’s not, that’s the job of the journalists working in the field day in, day out.

You obviously have a deep mistrust of journalists. Most of us never write a word of clickbait. I certainly don’t put FOI requests in as some kind of fishing expedition. I write them as succinctly as possibly and keep the parameters as tight as I can in order to not create work for the officer.

Assume you’re a journalist? Not sure you realise just how many people there are who think their Facebook page with several rants means they are a journalist….They often hide behind anonymity (though the ‘what do they know’ website is amusing), and make no attempt to source publicly available data.

The Telegraph or Times journos tend to use their own name at least.

I work for a non-departmental government body which awards grant funding to businesses as well as academic institutions and other public bodies. We get inundated with FOI requests from bid writers who charge to support businesses writing grant applications. It’s really frustrating as they make out they have an inside track but the info is all available in the public domain

Yes. I said upthread that I don’t regard ‘citizen journalists’ as journalists. They have no training, know no law, have no editorial oversight and have no access to journalistic resources or contacts.

If it’s them that people are criticising, I agree.

The national and regional press isn’t like that. Nor, obviously, are broadcast news journalists.

Frankly I suspect that relatively few FOI requests come from proper journalists.

(I’m not a journalist.)

I've done a ton of NHS FOI requests and most of these are obviously fishing exercises for sales pitches. Equally my favourite are the ones that ask for the personal e-mail addresses and mobile telephone numbers of all GPs within the county, and then complain when we decline to provide them.

Equally irritating are people who write to their MP about a healthcare issue but then refuse to give their consent for their issue to be investigated. Without their consent we can't do anything, then they complain again because the response isn't satisfactory.

Well of course I realise how many people call themselves journalists. They undermine the trade I’ve been in for 25 years. They are absolutely not the same people as bona fide journalists who don’t have the time or energy to submit spurious FOIs in the hope of finding a ‘story’.

Legitimate journalists are literally up to their eyeballs in work. The last thing they need to do is create bollocks stories based on illegitimate FOIs. There are enough stories ripe for the picking landing in their inboxes every day that they simply don’t have the time to cover.

We argued recently that that frequent requests from the same person/organisation were vexatious and it was upheld. But there was a lot of work went into proving it.

I used to work for a local council doing FOI's and the information requested should always be provided unless it is covered by one of the exemptions. We would have staff members asking us why do they want the information and the answer was always none of your business. FOI's are or should be purpose blind. The relevant questions are do we hold this information, can we exempt it. If not it should be provided, what people choose to do with the information is up to them.

It absolutely DOES matter who's asking

Every 'citizen journalist', 'auditor', 'Freeman of the Land', stalker and any and all racist, 'anti-woke' axe grinders are going nuts trying to prove conspiracies, find something to 'publish' on their Steam/Truth Social/YouTube channels

FOI is absolutely a tool for harassment

I love (ironically) Freemen on the Land. “Man overboard!”

Yes, they are irritating loons. But fascinatingly nuts.

I work for a local authority and get a lot of FOIs to answer, or contribute to. I do agree with the principle of FOIs. However, they create an awful lot of work. We get a lot of requests that are similar, but just different enough that you have to do the work again. The questions are sometimes ambiguously phrased, or the way the question is worded just doesn't match up with how we handle the information. Or people just don't understand what they are asking about. I think often people may misuse or misrepresent the data.

And, while I answer all the questions as they are asked, and professionally, I do often wonder what the person is going to do with the information. It often feels like a data-trawl to feed unpleasant tabloid headlines, and I don't enjoy being part of that.

I think it's really good that public-sector organisations are held accountable. It's just that the way it is done is very inefficient. I think probably asking for more information to be routinely published in a standardised format and reducing the amount that can then be enquired about would be better.

I work for a uni in a small team of 2 and FOIs are my responsibility. I absolutely hate them. I spend such a lot of time answering them when I have so much other work to do. Bane of my life.

I saw one of the health boards in Scotland is facing court action from the ICO for their slow response times. I wonder what their issue is - lack of staff or insane amounts of requests or both? I’ve only ever submitted one FOI in my life and I got the answer that I needed in order to prove to my GP what the criteria for a certain surgery was. My GP was adamant I was wrong, got the proof from the horses mouth so to say, then got referred for my surgery and problem solved. I can only imagine theres loads of silly requests. I laughed at one mentioned up thread asking about paranormal activities lol