As reported by the Newspaper Society: Justice Minister Helen Grant confirmed to the Commons on Tuesday (29 January) that as set out in its response to the Justice Select Committee’ post legislative review of the Act, the Government, "will consider how the cost of compliance might be reduced through changes to the cost limit which would also require secondary legislation. The Government will also look at other options to reduce the burden on public authorities in relation to the cost limit, including where one person or group of people's use of FOIA to make unrelated requests to the same public authority is so frequent that it becomes inappropriately or disproportionately burdensome.”
In last week’s Westminster Hall debate on Freedom of Information, MPs referred to the protests by the Campaign for Freedom of Information and the NS against these proposals. Justice Committee Chairman, Sir Alan Beith spoke of the Committee’s particular concerns about their potential effect on local newspapers. The last Government’s economic consultants had highlighted how these changes would hit media and MPs the hardest. Sir Alan said: “Complying with freedom of information requests involves costs, but it can also create savings.
“We rejected proposals that what we regarded as more subjectively measured activities, such as reading and consideration time, should be included in the time to calculate costs, but we recommended a small reduction in that period. The Government took a different view in their response and said they would make 'efforts to reduce burdens' arising from what they call the ‘industrial’ use of the Act.
“They say that time taken to consider whether information should be released or to redact it before release should count towards the time limit. They say that they will consult on the change and will seek to develop a method of calculation that will be consistent across public authorities….We are concerned about that and particularly about the potential effect on local newspapers.
“My area has a unitary authority, and if a local newspaper wanted to follow up stories about several different local services— education, highways and social services—it could quickly fall foul of that aggregation. I should be grateful to the Minister if she thought carefully about that. We examined charging, and we considered that it was not appropriate to go down that road.
“Any charge designed genuinely to recoup costs would deter genuine requests, and few kinds of charging would deter frivolous requests or, for that matter, what the Government call industrial requests.
“There are such things—industrial requests from large commercial companies who want to collect a lot of information and could afford to do so if there were charges; or requests from less well funded organisations, including small local newspapers, which are not going through a very profitable period at the moment. Those requests could be made in other ways.
“If a charging system were introduced, requests from private individuals might well be handed over to media organisations, in pursuit of a legitimate campaign, for example, to find out what was going on in government. The Government agreed with us about charging, but they have said that they are considering charging people to go to the Information Tribunal. That would be a matter of some concern.”
Shadow Justice Minister Andy Slaughter said: “The Newspaper Society, in its briefing for today’s debate, as well as the Campaign for Freedom of Information and a number of national newspapers, have tried to draw attention to the worrying fact that ways are being found to limit access by way of cost.
“Generally speaking, those are occult ways of doing it; it is not a head-on attempt to restrict.” He added: “Cost is a convenient way to turn down requests without having to justify things more thoroughly."
The Campaign for Freedom of Information is holding an open briefing for journalists and campaigners on the renewed threat to the FOI on 18 February at 2pm at The Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EA Full details and a briefing are available here.
