While crises like Grenfell have high- lighted the issue of access to information from public sector contracts with private sector firms – outsourcing – Gill points to another fundamental area that the law is not yet addressing. She says: “The context is more chal- lenging now, not least because of the digital age that we are living in. When the legislation was designed it was very much a paper-based world and the way that decisions are made now is faster and not necessarily documented on paper. We’re making decisions in a digital age and I think that’s presenting challenges for access to information. But a digital envi- ronment for decision making shouldn’t be at odds with people’s access to informa- tion rights. We need to work just as hard to make sure that the legislation is fit for operating in a digital age.”
She said: “Some other countries have already made changes and it’s interest- ing what’s happening in Scotland where housing associations have already been brought within the scope of legislation. So we’re watching developments in other places as well.”
Interface
Alongside this growing gap between information law and the real world, another reason an update is needed is because access to information has fallen out of sync with the other side of the ICO coin – data protection. On one side is the law that gives us our right to access information, and on the other is the law protecting our information. The latter has been boosted by the GDPR. It’s a point made by the commissioner who, in the outsourcing report, said: “The recent reforms introduced by the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have shown the importance of
October-November 2019
keeping privacy rights under review and adapting them to changing circumstanc- es. FOIA and the EIR now face similar challenges.”
Gill says that while these two areas of ICO business are separate, she expects more activity at their interface. “I think there is a very wide range of skills that our casework team needs. They need to be investigators, negotiators, they need to be information seekers, they need to be communicators. These are very interest- ing roles requiring a wide range of skills in the context of information rights. But FOI is just one part of what the ICO as a whole does. Much larger numbers of people are focussed on our data privacy side and
Gill Bull
there are lots of interfaces between these two. These are two sides of the same coin – access to information from organisations and privacy rights for individuals – and there are some connections between how the two bits of legislation interface. For example when people are making requests for personal information it’s part of our data protection casework – but I think there will be increasing numbers of que- ries and information requests about how organisations are creating their artificial intelligence algorithms and I expect in the future we will be seeing a lot more infor- mation requests about these sorts of data protection issues. I think it will be a very interesting space.”
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