Charles on… anything that comes along

One of the topics that I feel strongly about (even though I’ve only used FOI very briefly) is Freedom of Information - and in particular the FOI Act. And now the government’s stupid idea of effectively lowering the ceiling of enquiries that can be made by putting a higher price on civil servants’ time.

But the charity Public Concern at Work has calculated that bringing in those changes will cost at least £12 million:

Using figures published by the Government which suggest that it costs officials between £1 and £2 to read a single page, the charity calculates that it will cost £7.2m for one official in each of the 100,000 public bodies to read the new rules and guidance restricting FOI requests and a further £5m for them to think about them.

Their response to the suggested new regulations is worth a read:

In particular, when looking at the benefits it is important to recognise that freedom of information requests bring real and substantial savings to the public purse. This is because they deter waste, inefficiency and fraud across the public sector. One example from the wider public sector mentioned in Don Touhig’s Commons debate on 7 February was the Yorkshire Post’s story about a shower for the Chief Constable that cost £28,000

Great stuff. Perhaps an FOI request to find out who came up with the new regulations and whether they did a cost-effectiveness study on it?

And I like the cut of PCAW’s jib. I wonder if they’d look at the case for freeing our data?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• A very brief word on George Bush: why "freedom" but not "democracy"? (20 January 2005; score: 44.84%)
• How the House of Commons made it harder to work out how much MPs have cost: by using PDFs (21 October 2004; score: 36.79%)
• Your search for "information farmer" yielded no results but your own, you egotist (29 August 2006; score: 35.94%)