Home Office responds
The Home Office has been in touch with me following the item below. They make the fair point that their poor score on adverse decisions from the Information Commissioner is mainly due to their bad record of excessive delays in the early period of FOI. This is what they say:
"You state that the Home Office has had most complaints upheld against it by the ICO. This is factually correct but actually misleading as we now have a very good record with the ICO on substantive decisions.
"In the early days of FOI we had a number of decisions upholding complaints about delays – 13 in total. These mostly stem from early 2005 when our performance on answering requests on time was poor – it has improved significantly since then. It is also misleading because the ICO no longer issues decision notices in these sorts of cases (section 10 complaints).
"In terms of actual FOI decisions we have made to withhold or release information our record is good – there have been 6 decisions relating to the HO – 5 upheld our decision (1 with an adverse comment about providing advice) and 1 partially upheld our decision (the ICO’s website says the complaint was fully upheld but this is an error)."
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Not sure why you are allowing a political entity the chance to spin this disgraceful catalogue of failure into a 'we made some mistakes but now we are great' story.
The Home Office has continually lied about immigration, crime and identity cards, yet you allow them to use this blog to selectively answer the charges against them.
Is the ´óÏó´«Ã½ not supposed to be impartial and not allow political 'right on' messages to be published without a contrary perspective?.
For once I wish Mr Dockree would comment on this specific article and use his own personal experience of the FOI act and the Home Office that I have been following through this , this one example shows the falsehood of the response of the Home Office.
Joseph requests my response on this matter? I am intrigued rather than flattered.
In my case it is still ongoing, Joseph so comment would be inappropriate because I do not know the half of it - just that falsehood responses are the least of my worries. Any response would be nice but even that seems beyond whomever. And my independent source has just today been gentle told to go away. What a load of conundrums, eh Joseph LOL
Thanks though and good luck with the Balen Report. I am almost on your side now - if only for the frustration of it all