The right to know
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The UK's FOI Act gives citizens the right to access a broad swathe of non-personal information held by public sector organisations including central and local government departments and councils, hospitals, schools and the police.
For more than two decades, liberals in the UK looked jealously across the Atlantic at the US Freedom of Information Act (FOI) and wanted one of their own. If government could be made more open, they argued, it could also be made more just.
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A white paper was published in 1997 by the newly elected Labour government that laid the foundations for a radical bill, but it was not until 1 January 2005 that it became law.
The UK's FOI Act gives citizens the right to access a broad swathe of non-personal information held by public sector organisations including central and local government departments and councils, hospitals, schools and the police.
There are many exemptions to this right (ministers can block the release of documents that they deem is not in the public interest, for example), and this has made implementing the Act difficult. This means that data has to be tagged, and processes established, so that officials know when - and when not to - release information.
One of the problems of the Act is that it appears, in some places, to contradict the goals and stipulations of the Data Protection Act (DPA), which sets out to ensure privacy and protect individuals from the use of inaccurate or irrelevant information.
FOI provides no additional right for an individual to ask for data about themselves - that right is already established under the DPA. Similarly, the law states that information need not be disclosed if it violates any of the principles of the Data Protection Act - or if it is not deemed to be in the public interest.
FOI placed a huge burden on public sector bodies. By the 2005 deadline, many organisations, in both central and local government, had not implemented systems capable of readily or cost-effectively yielding information to the public on demand, or of tracking requests. Indeed, many have never actually completed any kind of audit of what information they actually hold.
To make matters worse, most public sector bodies had no idea of the scale of requests they were likely to receive, the form that these requests would take or how the law would be applied if they were refused. Because of the government's 'big bang' approach to implementation, that is something they are only now discovering.
