Five ways to stop your FOI request being rejected

Ten years ago, the then new Freedom of Information (FOI) Act gave anyone – journalist or otherwise - the right to information held by all sorts of public bodies.

The public bodies had to answer any questions put to them. And to stop foot-dragging, the Act specified how they had to deal with requests. They had to respond within twenty working days, for instance. They couldn’t charge for answering questions. And the Act applied to a wide range of bodies including government departments, local authorities, state schools, universities, the armed forces, the police and the NHS.

That was all good news for journalists. But there were also protections against the misuse of the Act and the wasting of public servants’ time. So, for instance, an acceptable response to an FOI request is: “the answer is in our press release – so we’re not going to prepare one just for you.” Or the answer can be: “that information will be in our Annual Report in a few weeks, so you can wait for that.” Or the request can be denied because the information is commercially sensitive, or because it asks for personal information, which comes under the Data Protection Act.

Kevin Steele, the BBC Academy legal expert, and Martin Rosenbaum, BBC News’s FOI specialist, were presenting a session on ‘FOI for beginners’, to help journalists make use of the Act to extract information for stories, and avoid getting rebuffed by public servants who would rather keep the information to themselves.

Martin advised that part of the secret of a successful FOI request is to understand and steer round the permitted exemptions. Formulating your question is an art in itself, which, in extreme cases, can produce comically pedantic responses from officials.

I particularly enjoyed this one:

FOI question: ‘In these years, how many [FOI requests did] you answer within the legal limit of 20 working days and how many did you not answer within 20 working days?’

Answer: ‘All of them’.

The question needed to be divided into two. By amalgamating the ‘more’ and ‘less’ questions, the local authority could say that all requests fell within those two categories. They must have had a good laugh about that.

But all requests are subject to the same kind of potential get-outs if you don’t think carefully. Martin’s tips for a successful FOI request include:

- Ask for something the public body has stored in a file somewhere. “You can’t force people [under the Act] to collect information they’re not recording already.”

- Use the jargon they use. One request to a government quango didn’t get a result because it asked for details of a “backlog” of unanswered questions. No response was given since the quango had no record of “backlogs”. It emerged that the phrase to use would have been “historic caseload”.

- Don’t ask for too much work to be done. Depending on what kind of body you’re asking, a request can be rejected if it’s expected to take more than 18 or 24 hours’ work for one person – because that would be too expensive. If you’ve asked more than one question and have been rejected for that reason, you can then say: ‘which questions can you answer within the cost limits?’

- Remember that the public body is obliged to be helpful. That’s part of the Act, and can work to your advantage: you might avoid a rejection if you don’t know exactly what data exists by adding a request for “a breakdown on an alternative basis”. They shouldn’t then give the excuse that you didn’t ask for exactly the right thing.

- You are allowed to request what form in which the answer will be given in. If you are dealing with data, you will want spreadsheets or csv files that you can work with rather than PDFs, for instance.

Although for a journalist it’s a challenge not to let your public body off the hook, Martin emphasised that it’s worth keeping the relationship with the FOI officer of an organisation as cordial as possible: “it’s always good to be polite.”

If you want to find out more, here are some useful resources:

- WhatDoTheyKnow.com offers the chance to submit an FOI request via the site itself. It also offers a large searchable database of FOI requests and the responses they elicited.

- FOI Directory includes a list of the FOI officers of many UK organisations.

- Martin Rosenbaum’s own BBC blog covers FOI matters particularly affecting news journalism.

Ten years on from the introduction of the FOI Act, we may look back on these as the golden years: the government has set up a review into FOI whose members, Martin says, are “not friends of FOI”. Indeed, its terms of reference, including looking at such ideas as “the burden of the Act on public authorities” do not look likely to produce extra freedoms for UK journalism.

If you have any questions, now may be the time to ask.