Councils push for tighter legislation on FoI requests

Council leaders have called for tighter controls on Freedom of Information (FoI) requests claiming they are a ‘burden’ on local authorities. 

The Local Government Association (LGA) has proposed the introduction of fees for FoI requests and suggested the time councils spend responding to them should be lowered from 18 to eight. 

During a consultation concerning the FoI Act, the LGA cited requests had increased by 39 per cent over the past three years. It also warned that councils were facing increasing requests of a commercial and ‘vexatious’ nature. 

Among other recommendations, the LGA advised: the protection of sensitive information by making Section 36 a class-based exemption similar to Section 35 (“which means there is no need to show any harm in order to engage the exemption”) and removing the requirement for a determination of the application by a ‘qualified person’; preserving a safe space for public bodies to consider policy options in private, comparable to that currently afforded to central government (i.e. extension of Section 35 to public bodies); and amending Section 11 (1) (a) when considering the means of communicating the requests to the applicant by deleting the following ….’or in another form acceptable to the applicant.’

The Association also put forward a number of proposed changes in relation to charging. It called for: inclusion within the activities that can be taken into account when estimating the cost of compliance under regulation seven, of redacting information to be excluded from disclosure such as personal data and sensitive commercial information; amendment of the current provision in Section 12 (4) to enable authorities to aggregate requests from the same or different persons made at the same or different times under the ‘appropriate limit’ to eliminate splitting requests; a reduction in the appropriate limit to eight hours (equivalent to one day) from 18 hours beyond which the applicant should be required to pay; and an increase in the hourly rate, ‘which has not been amended for 10 years’, to bring it in line with current costs.

The consultation response said: “The LGA recommends that applicants are required to set out the public interest in disclosing the information, with the provision that an authority is not obliged to respond if this information is not clearly set out.

“The LGA supports the overwhelming view of local authorities in favour of reducing the burden of FoI through stricter controls and/or reducing the fee limit in order to focus resources on disclosure of information on grounds of genuine public interest, rather than on commercial or research interest or on handling frivolous or vexatious requests.”