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

They are not "fascinating" when they are wasting taxpayers' money on lunatic missions to prove tax recovery is illegal, we have rights under the Magna Carta and Common Law and whatever else they don't believe in doesn't exist or does not apply to them

Well I think they’re fascinating. So there.

But only in the same way that any people who gather in fringe or crazy movements are fascinating. Conspiracy theorists (big overlap with FOTL, probably) are fascinating in their own way, for example, or ultra-vegans or Jedi Knights. Comical, all of them, but fascinating.

Even so, yes, I wish all of these people and lots of others would stop wasting tax payers’ money.

I disagree. I think this stuff is important and needs to be in the public domain. Especially procurement. Someone has decided that the NHS will only procure from a certain company e.g printer cartridges and this is the despite the fact generic brands could be supplied for significantly cheaper. That’s taxpayer money being wasted and it also means that whoever is in charge can just give contracts to their friends - see Michelle Mone and the PPE scandal.

Procurement is generally all published anyway and there are really strict regulations governing public sector procurement. I can assure you we have very little ability to dictate printer cartridges or whatever. Even when it makes no sense to swap suppliers we have to run a procurement despite the fact swapping x for y would cause us a ton of work.
Most of those FOIs are either suppliers who can't be bothered to do the leg work or who are fishing for email addresses to spam us with marketing. None of them actually do actually get down to value for money type stuff.

This!
We live in a democracy, the media is the 4th Estate.

God knows what would happen if we didn't have investigative journalists unveiling wasted resources, mismanagement, corruption and general shitshows of politics and the public sector.

FOI is fundamental to the functioning of a democratic society. The fact some people are begrudging journalists this information is quite worrying. Do people really not understand how vital access to information is?

This

If it is a time soak then maybe default transparency rather than multiple separate disclosures could be explored as a potential solution. This is quite a febrile time politically to decide that the public don't get to know how their tax is spent.

I understand it is being abused. But there must be a potential solution

"My 'favourite' are the ones that are blatantly trying to find out if we're doing something 'woke', which are pretty frequent."

"Woke"? Like trying to find out how much public money you've wasted on rainbow silliness and the extent to which you've rewritten your policies to discriminate against women and girls? That kinda thing

Good God.

I was trying and failing to get NHS funding for a relative and met with the manager of the department who had denied the claim. I strongly suspected that they were feeding me bullshit and I subsequently sent in FOI requests which proved to me that what I’d been told was untruthful.

Exactly. A group of MNers have used FOIs to get proof that every NHS hospital in this country says it provides single sex accomodation but will let any man who asks into the 'women only' bays.

They've found policies saying that women who object should be lied to, that staff who don't lie that there are no men in the ward will be disciplined. One policy I saw says that women who ask for an actual female health care professional will be made to drop their demands, apologise and submit to being touched by a man, or else can be discharged and refused care.

Public institutions spending public money bloody well should be made to publicise their discriminatory illegal policies and FOI is the mechanism to force them to do so.

FOI can be useful but it's not too hard for high profile orgs to get around the legislation. There are several ways of avoiding giving information. Exemptions can be used liberally. Even when incorrectly applied and overturned on appeal, people can delay cases until issues are no longer relevant or likely to be headline news. It is illegal to delete e-mails after a request comes in, but controversial e-mails can be deleted prior to requests coming in. These are just two techniques, but there are many others.

You can bet that someone in these organisations wanted this information to come out though. Possibly a MNer working in the FOI department.

Most these take up a huge amount of resources for which the respondents can see is of no benefit to anyone. We even get ones from students so in effect the tax payer is paying me to do their research for them, not really what the law was for.

As for those from proper journalists, at least these tend to be well articulated so you are not wasting even more time going backwards and forwards trying to figure out what they actually want.

There are illegal discriminatory polices in my workplace which I wanted to come out, but if I'd leaked them I'd be risking my job and my professional registration. Who can afford to risk that? But with an FOI the organisation is legally required to respond.

The first time I FOId my employer, the person who replied called me a slur in writing in their response. There aren't undercover MNers answering FOIs everywhere, some places there are disgruntled overworked people who think that those asking for FOIs are just troublemakers with too much time on their hands. And others who think you should just be able to lie or bin them. You just have to look at the thread to see that.

Public bodies have proven that they can't be trusted to act with integrity or to obey the law, and FOIs shine sunlight on that in a way you can't expect employees to do. Look at what happens to whistleblowers.

FOI's are an important tool for our democracy, as citizens we are entitled to know what decisions are being made on our behalf.

A lot of this stuff already is in the public domain though. I have lost count of the number of FOIs that I have responded where the answer is to direct the person to info that is readily available on a website.

I’ve used FOI and SAR requests during litigation when the other side are deliberately withholding material or obfuscating. Often useful to compare what has been provided from different sources.

That would be fine if it was the case that journalists were asking serious questions about corruption or mismanagement.

I’ve worked in this field for 16 years and my experience is that the vast majority of requests from people who declare they are journalists are usually not about serious corruption. Most of them are about minor local issues. Nothing corrupt, mysterious or secret.

My most memorable request was ‘how many reports and complaints of hauntings in service-owned buildings have you received in the past x years’ that’s a genuine request I dealt with about 12 years ago. From a journalist on the Telegraph. It’s hardly in the spirit of the Act is it?

And that’s without the fuckwits who make requests for plans for alien invasion or the zombie apocalypse. So hilarious. So naughty and mischievous. So. Fucking. Tedious.

I’ve not met a single FOI officer who would routinely break the law or make stuff up. We’re talking about matters of
legal obligation and my colleagues and I do actually tend to take it seriously.

The ‘woke’ shit we currently deal with is most often about content warnings and trigger warnings in English literature reading lists and texts. What the most interested journalist is looking for is an excuse to slag off young people for being over-sensitive and universities for ‘pandering’ to them. Actually what is happening is making sure that sensitive content is appropriately signalled to anyone that needs to know. You might think Wuthering Heights doesn’t need it, but Heathcliff is a bully who hangs Isabella’s dog. There’s distinct DV and why shouldn’t someone be pre-warned about that if reading it without knowing might hurt them? That’s not woke, that’s being considerate to people to whom you have a responsibility not to cause upset or damage.

I enjoy my job. It pays me a good living and I take it seriously. But not every requester is a serious enquirer carrying a blazing sword of truth to cut through obfuscation and expose corruption. They just aren’t. That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve their answer or aren’t going to get it, where appropriate, but the 4th estate it ain’t.