Authorities that hold the information must supply the information frre of any financial charge for finding and collating it, if meeting the request costs them no more than £600 (in the case of national governement departments) or £450 (in the case of local councils and other types of authorities).
The Act has been used extensively by journalists and researchers, generally with great success.
A request by Heather Brooke to the House of Commons made it reveal details of what some members of Parliament were claiming in expenses to finance and run their second homes.
Disclosures prompted by regional and local journalists using the Act have included:
- the numbr of under 16s requiring treatment for drug problems and alcohol related illness at a local hospital
- the number of police officers arrested for alleged crimes
- how many crimes reported to police, including alleged sexual assaults, are given no publicity by the police
- how many children have been excluded from local schools
- only two councils had met Government targets on the welfare of children in council care
- councils in the South of England had made the same planning procedure mistake 68 times in relation to mobile phone masts
- elderly residents of a nursing home allegedly suffered verbal and physical abuse
- national government departments and ministries e.g. the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Prime Minister's Office.
- the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the national assemblies of Northern Ireland and Wales
- the armed forces
- local government authorites e.g. metropolitan, county, district, city and parish councils, transport executives, waste disposal agencies, police forces, fire services
- national park authorities
- universities, colleges and schools (if in the state sector)
- the National Health Service
- various advisory councils, and regulatory bodies with statutory powers, e.g. Ofcom, the General Medical Council.
Courts and tribunals are also not covered by the Act, though some information gathered in their functions will be available if an FOI request is made to the relevant government department which it holds it e.g. the Ministry of Justice.
If a journalist is not sure what information an authority holds, before they make an FOI request they should check its website, if it has one, and if there is any likelihood of the information being published there by the authority routinely. Each authority is required by the Act to have som form iof publication scheme showing what it publishes. if the ifnormation is not listed there, then the journalist, if they are unsure how to precisely describe in an FOI request the ifnormation they want, should ring the authority concerned to ask the relvant person (i.e an official who co-ordinates FOI matters) about the types of information it holds.
Public authorities are required by section 16 of the Act to give someone proposing to make a request, or someone who has already made one, 'advice and assistance, so far as it would be reasonable to expect the authority to do so'.
- The public authority should tell you, before you make the request what informatiopn of the type you want may be available.
- The public authority should give you guidance to avoid your request breaching the cost of limit for such information to be provided without charge.
Absolute exemptions
Some exemptions are 'absolute'. This means under the Act, the public authority does not have to give any reason for not disclosing the information, beyond stating that the exmeption applies because fo the nature of the information.
Absolute exemptions include the following categories of information stated in the Act:
- Section 21 - infromation reasonably accessible by other means.
- Section 23 - information supplied to the public authority by or relating to bodies dealing with security matters
- Section 32 - court records
- Section 40 - personal information (a public authority may decide that an FOI request encompasses exempt personal data).
- Section 41 - information provided to the authority in confidence by abother party
- Section 44 - information the disclosure of which is forbidden by other law
Qualified exmeption means that if the public authority decides not to supply the information in these categories, it must give reasons, showing how it has applied the 'public interest test', as laid down by the Act, to justify its refusal to provide the information. Under the Act, the information may be withheld only if the public interest in withholiding it is greater than the public interest in releasing it.
Copyright
Copyright is a branch of intellectual property law and it protects the products of people's skill, creativity, labour or time.
Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the Copyright Act), copyright protects any literary, darmatic, artistic, or musical work, sound, recording, film, boradcast, or typographical arrangement.
Reproduction of copyright work may constitute infringement.
There is no copyright in facts, news, ideas or information. copyright exists in the form of in which information is expressed and the selection and arrangement of the material, all of which involves skill and labour.
However, while there is no copyright in a news story, persistent lifting of facts from another paper, even if there is rewriting each time, may still be an infringement because of the skill, labour and judgement that went into research on the stories.
Fair dealing is a defence to breach of copyright for use of extracts of a copyrighted work, properly attributed to its author.This means, fair dealing with a copyright work for the purpose of reporting current events is therefore, not an infringment provided it's accompanied by sufficient acknowledgement of the work and its author and provided the work has been made available to the public.
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