A recent blog article by Jon Baines highlights the improvements to Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) regulation and enforcement by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
Despite these efforts, Baines calls on public authorities to do more, arguing that compliance teams are either under-resourced or lack the will to comply with statutory and guideline compliance timescales. One particular area of poor performance concerns parts 8.5 and 8.6 of the 2018 Code of Practice, issued by the Cabinet Office under section 45 of FOIA, which requires public authorities with over 100 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) employees to publish quarterly FOIA compliance performance data. After six years, few public authorities that meet the criteria are publishing such data, including, as Baines points out to the best of his knowledge, the ICO. Baines recommends that the ICO should, in the first instance, lead by example before writing to all the public authorities that meet the criteria to remind them of their obligations. Baines also recommends that the requirements of parts 8.5 and 8.6 of the Code may need revising.
In a separate post about pseudonymous FOI requests, Baines highlights a recent First Tier Tribunal appeal that was struck out on the basis that the person's name making the request must be real.
What is this page?
You are reading a summary article on the Privacy Newsfeed, a free resource for DPOs and other professionals with privacy or data protection responsibilities helping them stay informed of industry news all in one place. The information here is a brief snippet relating to a single piece of original content or several articles about a common topic or thread. The main contributor is listed in the top left-hand corner, just beneath the article title.
The Privacy Newsfeed monitors over 300 global publications, of which more than 5,750 summary articles have been posted to the online archive dating back to the beginning of 2020. A weekly roundup is available by email every Friday.
