Freedom of Information ... No more

New government proposals will severely curtail the number of information requests answered under the Freedom of Information Act. The Campaign for Freedom of Information is concerned that "the proposed new fees regulations under the Act will allow authorities to refuse on cost grounds a high proportion of requests which are currently required to answer."
At present,

Authorities can refuse a request if the costs of dealing with it exceed the “appropriate limit”.6 This is £600 for government departments and £450 for other public authorities. In deciding whether the limit has been reached authorities can take into account the time they estimate would be needed to determine whether they hold the information and to locate, retrieve and extract it. Staff time is costed at a fixed rate of £25 an hour. These provisions are set out in fees regulations made under the Act.7.
Authorities are also entitled to aggregate requests for similar information made within 60 days of each other by the same person or people apparently acting in concert or as part of a campaign. One effect of this is to prevent an applicant from
circumventing the cost limit by breaking a large request which would exceed the limit into several smaller requests, each within it. Requests can also be refused if they are vexatious.

However, the government has now published draft regulations according to which:

(1) authorities would in future be able to take account of the costs of the time spent reading the information, consulting other bodies about it and considering whether to release it, in deciding whether the £600 or £450 limits have been reached. The time spent searching for and extracting the information would continue to be included, as at present.
(2) authorities would be able to aggregate unrelated requests made within a 60 working day period by the same individual or organisation, if it was reasonable to do so in the circumstances, and refuse them all if the combined costs exceeded the £600/£450 limit.

In short, this allows public bodies to refuse requests involving new issues (more time-consuming), politically sensitive requests, requests with implications for several departments, authorities or companies, and anything referred to ministers. If they call for a two-hour meeting of six people simply to consider the request, that's already £300, add a few hours looking for the information, consulting other bodies and you soon reach the limit of £600. They simply need to estimate the cost to turn the request down.
There is absolutely no need for this as there are enough safeguards protecting public authorities from requesters making excessive demands. This needs to be stopped. Here's how:

- Ask your MP to support the Early Day Motion 845 calling on the government to drop the proposals.
- Ask your AM to support the Statement of Opinion (2006-0104)