FOI Live conference

The FOI Live 2006 conference took place in London (May 25, Alex Allan, Permanent Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs said on the topic of private bodies being added under FOIA:

"The Act does provide that private bodies who do provide public functions can be brought within the scope of the Act. We have been fairly cautious because we felt we needed to look at the lessons of applying the Act to 100,000 public bodies before we took it further. The sort of bodies we would be looking at extending this to are privately-run prisons and [school] academies, where you can argue they should operate to the same provisions of openness and accountability. All those bodies affected will be properly consulted. We need to get it right and we need to see FOI bed down before we can see what the boundaries are."

Download the presentations from the Conference