Freedom of Information
If sunlight is the best disinfectant, the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) is possibly a strongly relevant to good government as is electoral swing sweeping out established parties from power structures to let new blood in, disrupting lobbyist networks, ‘usual channel’ (backchannel) routines, etc.
FOIA is pretty wonderful. It gives you a (qualified) right to drop an email to any public authority, being as snippy as you like (in fact, terseness and clarity are very much encouraged) and they have to bend over backwards (up to 18 man hours’ worth) to get you an answer.
The problem is that ‘public authority’ is defined even more narrowly in FOIA than it is for other ‘good government’ citizens’ tools, like the Human Rights Act (which gives you rights against interference by public authorities) or judicial review (whereby any unfair or improper decision taken by a public authority can be put through the courts which can order that it should be ‘done right’, and fairly). In FOIA, public authorities are either the ones listed in Schedule 1 to the Act, or designated as such by the Secretary of State (i.e. by the government). The buck, seemingly, stops there. You can’t get anywhere with a FOIA request to any government contractors, like many care homes for example, or ex-national utilities, now privatised (e.g. Network Rail, BT, etc), or bodies charged with ‘self regulating’ and industry.
Or can’t you. This post is effectively a bleg: I would love to know from someone with experience with FOIA, whether the following hypothesis has any legal merit. I wonder whether you could probably construe s3(2)(b) as catching any information gathered (and thus now held) under delegated powers. It reads:
s3: Public authorities
(1)In this Act “public authority” means—
(a)subject to section 4(4), any body which, any other person who, or the holder of any office which—
(i)is listed in Schedule 1, or
(ii)is designated by order under section 5, or
(b)a publicly-owned company as defined by section 6.
(2)For the purposes of this Act, information is held by a public authority if—
(a)it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person, or
(b)it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.
I would love to be able to slap a FOIA on government contractors or pseudo-governmental regulatory bodies. How good would it be to FOIA the Press Complaints Commission for emails, reports, the lot… we could disinfect the single biggest influence in modern British politics and society, the popular press!
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