Current landscape
The largest volume of requests for the ICO are about local government. She says: “I think the emphasis on FOI is often on the big central government departments but what I’d call ‘every day’ FOI is local people asking about what is happening in their local area and in some ways is the backbone of access to information.”
“One of the challenges is that there isn’t comprehensive data about the performance of all public authorities within current reporting frameworks. So it can be quite hard to have that overview and understand about why some organisations are performing better than others. There are sometimes resource issues and the complexity of cases varies dramatically from organ- isation to organisation depending on what they do. Organisations can also have particular spikes in terms of interest of particular areas – that’s one of the fascinating things about the legislation; how volatile it can be in terms of where there is interest.”
Leadership gap
Having said that, she made one generalisation: “When things go wrong often the root cause is something to do with leadership or governance that means that organisations are not in a position to comply as well as they could to the detail of the legislation. I think the most important thing is that information rights are taken seriously at the most senior levels – that leaders do have both insight into what is happening and an oversight of how their own organisation is performing. What is important is how the issues are surfaced at the most senior level and how we make sure that the leadership of organisations is being accountable for information rights. There are very dedicated information rights professionals working in public authorities in lots of places and we need to make sure they are given the support internally by the leaders at the most senior level… and that’s
the challenge; that people need to step up and make sure that they are creating the conditions in which organisations can fulfil their obligations in both the spirit and the letter. If you look at public authorities in general there’s always room for improvement – we say this in our access to information strategy – Openness by Design.” Asked if information rights profes- sionals shared knowledge and supported each other she said: “There’s lots more that could be done in terms of peer support and best practice and I hope that’s something we can do more of. But the organisations in the wider access to information ecosystem are doing things as well, so The Campaign for Free- dom of Information runs training programmes and networking opportunities so I think there are a range of things out there, they are not all dependent upon the regulator, far from it.”
Data gap Linked to the issues about how to interpret the data – the quan- titative performance data – Gill says that the ICO also wants to deepen its understanding of its customers. Every year the ICO carries out a Trust and Confidence research survey which shows there are gaps in awareness between gender, age and nationality. “One of the things we need to think about as an organisation is how to better understand the people who are raising queries with us and how to make sure that we are promoting our services as much as we can.”
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Insights One figure that suggests more work is needed on the education of existing customers and that the ICO could improve the way it communicates with them, is that 40 per cent of the complaints it receives are rejected as premature. Gill says: “Some people get involved in making lots of information requests but not everyone. For people who make information requests as a once off it can be complicated to understand how processes and procedures work. As a regulator we are doing as much as we can to make it as accessible as it can be for people to use our services. We are working to take stock of our processes and think about how we describe them. Often the reason the cases are coming too early to us is because people haven’t had the final letter from the public authority or it is being reviewed internally.” Gill says this could be addressed by incorporating the docu- ments people need to make a request “so we are looking at developing more online forms encouraging people to have the information they need in order for us to be working on the case.”
Education Find out more:
www.indexers.org.uk E:
admin@indexers.org.uk
T: 0114 244 9561 20 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
So while the data show awareness of FOI rights have increased, there are disparities between different parts of society. Gill says the ICO hopes to address this: “There’s still room for doing more work to raise awareness and we need to think about particular groups where awareness is not as high as in others. Because for example younger people, according to our survey, are less aware of some of their information rights than others. That’s why an education programme would be quite useful and it’s something that we’re likely to look at over the period of our three-year plan to see if there is work that we can usefully do to promote information rights within education settings.” Asked if there could be any role for libraries in such a programme Gill says: “It’s probably a bit early to say because we haven’t shaped a programme but libraries are very interesting in terms of the different ways that library services are provided now. So we’d need to think about that in the round. But if we designed any campaign it would be very important to think about the role of information professionals – your readers – in promoting information rights. IP
October-November 2019
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