The public should be charged a fee for government documents released under freedom of information laws, according to a Ministry of Justice report.
It\’s called \”tax\”.
The public should be charged a fee for government documents released under freedom of information laws, according to a Ministry of Justice report.
It\’s called \”tax\”.
How very socialist of you. The point of a fee (which should be modest) is to prevent the service being free-at-the-point-of-use, which can lead to frivolous requests.
I suspect in this instance the point of a fee is to discourage requests in general.
Indeed, it is probable that the trivial ones are not the ones that bother TPTB, but rather the embarrassing ones.
I couldn’t find the document The Telegraph is talking about (why oh why don’t MSM articles link to their source materials?) but this collation of evidence submitted to the Justice Committee may be of interest:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmjust/writev/foi/foi.pdf
Frivolous requests are not helpful. But would a fee improve the system? And would public sector staff abide by statutory deadlines, stop forcing people to jump through hoops, and be less ‘sensitive’ about members of the public asking questions?
the obvious question to Connolley – who defines whether a request is “frivolous”?
@diogenes How about the CRU at UEA?
@ChrisM – CRY should be the custodians of all official data. They would find embarrassingly inept ways of losing it, I am sure.
btw Tim…I am glad you let Connolley post…he is the Murphmeister of the CAGW scientific consensus