大象传媒

I am impressed with the amount of interesting news stories you have managed to uncover using the FOI legislation. You are clearly a journalist who can sniff out a good story. It must potentially be a time-consuming business and, presumably, you must develop a knack for spotting a dead-end ahead of time and picking up the scent of an interesting lead early on in the process. However I do have some reservations about FOI.

When FOI requests have been made, one of the reasons they have been frustrated or denied is that the organisations in question claim that their normal way of working may be disrupted in the future. For example, if it were known that minutes of meetings were to be made public at some future date, participants may talk less freely.

Some may dismiss this argument. They may say, for instance, that public bodies SHOULD think carefully about what they say in private and always consider the wider public.

I believe that the former argument outweighs the latter. For example, many organisations hold so called 鈥渂rainstorming鈥� meetings where even bizarre ideas are considered. Most large public bodies plan many years ahead where more creative ideas may be appropriate 鈥� perhaps ideas that would not be popular right now but may be judged to be a winner in the future.

A government minister, for example, may be again asked to 鈥渢hink the unthinkable鈥�. This may be good operational and policy practice for the government, but hard and impractical to implement if they cannot keep records because they cannot print the unprintable.

The bit of information I would like an answer to is 鈥渨hat has been the tangible benefit of the FOI legislation?鈥� How many deaths and injuries have been prevented? How many people have seen a quantifiable improvement in their quality of life? How much money has been saved?

If the sum of the answers to my question is zero, then 鈥� dare I suggest this - perhaps the government is right to consider restrictions on FOI. Perhaps FOI requesters should be expected to spell out the potential tangible good that the answers to the request may bring to society, and this potential should be the main criteria for agreeing to an FOI request.

If the answers to my question are all non-tangible: e.g. 鈥渋t is good to know鈥�, 鈥渋t makes a good media story鈥�, 鈥渕ore transparent鈥�, then is the cost of FOI including the potential pitfalls I mentioned above worth the benefit? Even the UCI鈥檚 study consists of non-tangible questions, so they will surely get non tangible answers. This may be because they based their study on the original aims of the FOI laws (I happen to think that this legislation was badly drafted in the first place and not well thought through).

If potentially good MPs are dissuaded from politics because of the extra scrutiny from FOI; if potentially good judges decide not to enter law for the same reason, is this healthy? (Why do you want to know if they have been disciplined?)

You might say that the Scores-on-Doors scheme (www.scores-on-doors.co.uk) (the publication of local authority hygiene inspections of food establishments) may have resulted in less upset tummies as restaurants improve their standards (you never know this may even have saved someone鈥檚 life). Using this one issue, you may well be able to satisfy the criteria that I have suggested. This, however, raises another issue: the scores-on-doors scheme was already being considered by many councils (following the success of the U.S. scheme) before the Information Commissioner鈥檚 ruling. There is no doubt that the ruling accelerated implementation. The result has been that councils have rushed into it and there are countless schemes all across the country, using different systems. A national scheme will not be easy to implement and will take many more years precisely because each council has invested a lot of effort into producing their own schemes following FOI pressure. So, would a national scheme have been put in place anyway? Has FOI actually made the situation worse? Has democracy been strengthened or, perhaps, perverted? This is reminiscent of the rushed laws that are sometimes passed as a result of media pressure.

If most of the information that comes from FOI makes interesting reading and is good news copy rather than being a real benefit to society, then perhaps the government is right to suggest that they charge a fee for fulfilling certain requests. If FOI has given you (and us) some great news stories, then perhaps the 大象传媒 should set aside a budget for it. I know it is our (the public鈥檚) money whichever way, but it would be nice to have the cost allocated correctly. This is something I rarely see the 大象传媒 address. Frontier economics estimated the cost of FOI at a total of around 拢50m pa. You dispute that 鈥� and so do I. Even if you half the cost to 拢25m, it surely must a cost that must be justified. Nowhere on your blog do I see you attempt to justify this public expenditure (a 大象传媒 trait, of course).

FOI is great in principle, but I think that its importance is greatly exaggerated. If not implemented properly it could do more harm than good and can be costly. Perhaps it is only slightly higher than a hobby horse. Perhaps wind farms are considered to be a more important issue. The trouble is it is a media hobby horse. This immediately puts it several notches up the government鈥檚 priority list. Being that I am a humble taxpayer, I am trying to weigh up the 拢25m (let鈥檚 say) against the 大象传媒鈥檚 desire for the FOI laws to be left alone.

I suspect that, even if the 大象传媒 had to cough up some money, it would continue with the feed of stories from FOI. With the combination of Martin鈥檚 obvious journalistic and research skills and a decent budget to pay for FOI requests, it will come up with many more high quality stories from this source.

A lot of questions there, Ken. Some I hope to return to later. For the moment:

If the benefits of a policy are less tangible but still exist, isn't that still valid? In fact, perhaps such policies get less support than they deserve precisely because their benefits are less concrete and harder to specify?

And if FOI sometimes makes good news copy, who is that really benefitting - the 大象传媒 (well, yes) or our audience (well, maybe even more so)?

Firstly, sorry for inflicting the tome I sent you previously. I appreciate the fact that you managed to pick up points from it despite the time pressure you must be under!

This will be briefer!

You say that a policy whose benefits are hard to measure may get less support than it deserves (I paraphrase). I have several arguments I could counter this with, but I suppose, like beauty, this is in the eye of the beholder.

On your second point: if good news copy is the result (and no other public benefit): fine, then let the television licence payer pay for it!

It is true that it is difficult - if not impossible - to measure the tangible benefits of FOI. For example, there is little if any evidence of the cost savings of FOI. Harold Relyea, who was on the staff of the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress in the US in 1986, wrote that year that the current running costs for FOI administration were USD45 million while journalists estimated the cost of government PR and self-promotion at around USD1 billion a year. He concluded 'it is considerably less expensive to provide the public with the information it seeks through the FOIA than it is for the government to provide what it determines the public should know about agency activities and operations.' Unfortunately there are no similar comparisons in the Frontier Economics report on the impact of FOI in this country.

I echo Martin's question about the value of intangible benefits. It is very difficult to quantify the benefits of FOI but that doesn't mean the intangibles don't justify the existence of the law. At UCL (the study to which you refer in para 8) we will be measuring the act against 6 objectives that were set out for it - not in the law itself but in the speeches, debates, white paper, committee reports, and other literature about FOI prior to its passage in 2000.

The general and overarching goals of any access to information law are transparency (anti-corruption being the focus for many developing countries that pass these laws) and accountability. FOI provides the public with a tool to make government policy and decision-making more transparent; the fact that people can ask for any government information (though it may fall under an exemption) should, followed to its logical conclusion, make government more accountable for its decisions and actions. Those are the two main objectives we're looking at.

We will also be trying to discern whether FOI helps the public better understand how and why public authorities make the decisions they do, not only as an end in and of itself but also so they can more effectively participate in the political process (e.g. contacting their MPs about an issue of concern, asking their local council to take a certain action, voting in elections). In addition, we'll try to gauge whether, in the long run, FOI has an effect on the level of public trust and confidence in government. Finally, we'll try to find out whether the government's own decision-making processes improve as a result of FOI.

Although much of the data we collect to answer these questions will be qualitative, we will look at quantitative data gathered through an online survey of FOI requesters and content analysis of media articles in which information obtained through FOI is used. I would argue that the qualitative information we get through interviews with civil servants and analysis of publication schemes and disclosure logs, however, will be just as valuable. In the end, though, is it really about the numbers? How can one possibly put an exact pricetag on FOI - whether the cost of the law or the savings it provides?