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From FOI blog to formal regulatory rebuke: The case of the former Attorney General’s emails
As we report on today in The Times, the government has been issued with an unprecedented formal rebuke by the transparency watchdog for wrongly interfering to block one of my freedom of information requests. I wrote a blog in January setting out the challenge I faced trying to get hold of information on how Suella
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The FOI enforcement loophole: The case of Dominic Cummings
Rights are only rights when they come with a mechanism of enforcement. Otherwise, they are just pretty words. If ones tries leaving a restaurant without settling the bill one will quickly find out about how property rights are enforced. Traditionally, FOI requests have not faced issues with enforcement. If a government department holds a document
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The power of delay
Last year, I wrote about the issues I faced in trying to get hold of a copy of Rishi Sunak’s disclosure of interests to the Cabinet Office. Sunak was found to have breached parliamentary rules inadvertently by failing to declare his wife’s shareholding in a company which would benefit from government childcare policies. Following the
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Brotherly love: How the Foreign Office spent months trying to redact a simple term of endearment
Last year, as was widely reported, Boris Johnson took a sojourn to Venezuela for talks with its autocratic leader, Nicolas Maduro. He later received a ticking off from regulator ACOBA for “failing to clarify” his relationship with the hedge fund that set up the trip. Controversy also arose around how much the Foreign Office knew about the
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What happens when an FOI is selected for special treatment: intel gathering and obfuscation
Journalists often get the feeling that their FOI is being treated differently. It may be something which should be straightforward that suddenly takes months. It might be getting a phone call from a press officer despite having not approached the department for comment yet, or finding material being withheld on consistently flimsy grounds despite an
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Labour’s post-it note solution to FOI
The 20-year anniversary of the coming into force of the freedom of information act is a momentous occasion. For all the very real issues with the legislation, the delays, the obfuscation and the issues with enforcement, FOIA has been a true leveller in the public right to information. No longer do people need to have
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Trying to open the black box: how the government has resisted transparency about the civil service ethics watchdog
The average member of the public probably hasn’t heard of the Propriety and Ethics Team (PET). The unit, recently renamed the propriety and constitution team, sits at the heart of government in the Cabinet Office and performs a key public service role It is responsible for advising on the handling of any potential conflicts of
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What happens when the ICO declines to regulate?
When the ICO declines to adequately enforce its own rulings, it leaves requesters in a regulatory no-man’s land, undermining their rights to access information. Unlike in other countries, where requesters can pursue legal remedies directly, in the UK, requestors are almost entirely reliant on the ICO to uphold their information rights. On the one hand,
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A new way of delaying transparency
Turn your minds back to the late Sunak era, and you might remember a story about his declarations of interests. He was given a ticking off by the parliamentary commissioner for standards, after he had not declared his wife’s shareholding in a childcare company which would benefit from a government policy to pay incentives to
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Relight My FOIA 