Information Commissioner: Delay and Indecision

Taken from the "Your Right to Know"webiste run by Heather Brooke, sheds further light on the current problems at the ICO in terms of the management of appeals and the stanard of decision notices:

"I have uploaded the caseload database from the Information Commissioner’s Office, which I received 4 August 2005.It was quite a long process getting this database. Originally, in response to my 1 June 2005 FOIA request for ‘all complaints’ I was given a database containing just 375 entries. I knew from attending conferences that the Information Commissioner’s Office was already up to 1,000 complaints when I made my request, so I telephoned and discovered they had misinterpreted in an overly restrictive way. They agreed to send me the outstanding information in electronic form."

In supplement to Heather's posting:

*the Scottish ICO investigations manual makes interesting reading in comparison to what we know of the UK process

*The memorandum of understanding between the Information Commissioner and Government Departments, definitely points the cynics among us to comment on different, "less public" treatment for central govt compared to the rest of the public sector and the shyness of the ICO related to "big" decisions.