A Great FOI Idea From Across the Pond...

A charity is testing a website which automates the submitting, tracking, and publishing requests made under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.

MySociety, which runs sites including elected representative service TheyWorkForYou.com and mass pledge system PledgeBank.com, has built a list of FoI contacts at central government departments and is creating one for local authorities.

A request made through the new site is sent to the appropriate state sector contact from a unique email address, allowing all responses to be tracked and published on the site. "Everything the department sends to that address is tacked on," mySociety director Tom Steinberg said. "The whole communication is all online."

Steinberg said so far only one organisation – Parliament – has refused to reply to a request made through the system: "They said, we can't send you this information as you are going to put it on the internet."

More here.

Ah, The Irony...

The BBC today successfully fended off a Court of Appeal bid to force it to make public the Balen report, an internal review of its reporting in the Middle East.

Commercial solicitor Steven Sugar, of Putney, London, has waged a two-year battle arguing that the report should be available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.

He claimed it should be published in the light of allegations that the BBC has shown bias against Israel. His claim was backed by the Information Tribunal, but the High Court allowed an appeal by the BBC and ruled that the case fell outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act.

My favorite line:

The BBC maintains that it is vital for independent journalism that internal staff debates on news coverage should not be open to public scrutiny.