“I appreciate that Scottish public authorities had only a short period in which to prepare their organisations for the Act coming into force, but the duty to respond within 20 working days is not particularly onerous in most cases,” said Dunion, who published the Annual Report of the Scottish Information Commissioner (SIC) yesterday.
“I hope to see a radical improvement in this area in 2006,” he added.
But the Annual Report, the second from the SIC and the first since the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act (FOISA) came into force on 1st January 2005, is largely positive, revealing that the Scottish public has enthusiastically embraced freedom of information.
While local authorities are not obliged to keep records of the number of FOI requests they receive, the SIC logs all the appeals that result from those requests.
According to the Report, the SIC has received twice as many appeals as expected – 571, of which 240 were disposed of in 2005, 79% of these within four months.
In contrast to the widely held belief that only journalists were making use of the Act, the report reveals that 55% of all appeals were from ordinary members of the public. Twenty percent were from solicitors and only 7% were from journalists.
The Commissioner issued 90 decisions in the first year of the Act's operation. Of these, 31% were in favour of the applicant, 36% in favour of the public authority and 33% partially in favour of both parties. No enforcement notices have been issued so far.
According to the Report, public awareness of FOISA has also risen in the last year, with 72% of people having heard, or thinking that they had heard, of the Act, as compared to 44% in September 2004.
This is partly due to promotional activities by the SIC’s Office, but also to media use of the Act at local and national levels, said the Commissioner.
“The hard part has been done and the Act is in full use,” he said. “I would hope that we can build on that so that we have a society where information is provided, and received, as part of the mature exchange of a modern democracy.”
But the Commissioner warned people to take care when making an FOI request.
“People should be aware that dashing off an e-mail with a request causes the whole might of the Act to come into effect, with obligations on authorities,” he said. “This is not to discourage use of the legislation but, there is a difference between a well defined request, compared to insisting on all material held on a particular subject. Unwanted information which is then discarded has been provided at a real cost to the authority.”
He also warned against making ill-considered changes to the Act. The Scottish Executive announced a review of the legislation in December, to identify areas that may need fine-tuning.
“It is only to be expected that some aspects of the new regime will be unwieldy and uncomfortable,” said Dunion. “Whilst it is right to keep these under review and address them, we must also guard against changes which detract from the stated intent of the legislation, to provide a right to information and to bring about a shift in culture towards more transparency and accountability.”
According to reports, the Scottish Executive is considering bringing in a new system of charges for FOI requests, which are generally dealt with at little or no charge at present.
Such a move has been criticised in the light of a similar approach taken by the Irish Government, which introduced a flat £10 charge for requests. Following this, according to The Herald newspaper, the number of requests made by members of the public dropped by 75%.
