QR
Well-known member
- Joined
- 21 May 2019
- Messages
- 7,034
FOIs are also used by business trying to harvest useful (to them) commercial information from government in order to sell services back to them. These can be even more resource hungry than vexatious requests.I do not agree with the way the government are going about this. It looks really bad and looks Orwellian.
On the flip side of the argument, I know that FOI requests and EIR are regularly abused by vexatious campaigners and individuals and they are draining significant resource from already stretched to the limit Public Bodies to simply deal with the requests for information. The irony being that the precious resource is being diverted away from the very jobs they are being criticised for not doing effectively! Not only that but many FOI's cannot be answered "to the satisfaction of the enquiror" because they are the subject of legal proceedings. The advent of social media and the ease with which pressure groups can be whipped up (and often misinformation and conspiracy theories used to whip up genuine anger and paranoia) has made the problem exponentially worse.
I agree that government and its arms length bodies should be open and transparent, but at the same time they need the ability to robustly reject vaccuous and vexatious FOI's. I am not sure they always can or do at present.
It is an extremely tricky balance to find and I am not sure anyone has the right answer that will satisfy.
However I would disagree that a balance should be made. Whoever is going to oversee the setting of any balance has an opportunity to manipulate the rules to their advantage. I think the downsides are simply an annoying byproduct of transparency but one that has to be accepted seeing as you can't have one without the other.
Last edited: