The Central Clearing House, a
unit within the Dept for Constitutional Affairs, have issued
instructions to government departments to refuse FOIA requests which
merely ask if info exists.

The Act clearly requires information to be made available where it
exists - unless it is protected by the Act - so this practice must
logically breach the law. However, the way to ensure that they cannot
use this trick is to phrase the request as if the information does
exist.

It is also important to realise that the even where data is not
collated
in the form requested this does not mean it may be refused or provided
in a form other than as requested. Much data is sitting on databases
which can be interrogated to get the information required. For example,
suppose you want to know the age profile of staff in a government
department, so many at each age group, this information can gained by
interrogating the database.

Although the Act does not require the requester to give more than the
data required, it is expedient to use wording along these lines to warn
them you will be trouble if they do not obey the Act and avoid any
attempts to charge you:

"You will either have such information already collated
or
will be able to obtain it simply and cheaply by running
queries on your database. Self evidently, the work involved
will cost well below the upper limit set by the Act and
thus be obligatory to supply and free of charge.

Please supply the information by email in plain text format,
ie no attachments - I want to be able to open the email and
have the text showing in the body of the email. This will
obviate any charge for photostating.

If you have any problems with this request please come back
to me immediately. You have 20 days to reply under normal
circumstances. Simple delays in asking for further
information and/or clarification of an FOIA request are not
an exceptional circumstance justifying delay beyond the 20
days. "

I currently have an FOIA request in with a government body which if
successful will effectively breach the claim made by many commentators
on the Act that personal identifiable data cannot be obtained. There
is
some hope of this with people and organisations covered by the Act
because the Information Commissioner's website contains this:

From the Information Commissioner's website:

'An issue which will often arise is whether the Data Protection Act
prevents the disclosure of information identifying members of staff.
Applying the criteria suggested above, if the information requested
consists of the names of officials, their grades, job functions or
decisions which they have made in their official capacities, then
disclosure would normally be made. On the other hand, information such
as home addresses or internal disciplinary matters would not normally
be
disclosed. While it would be wrong to disclose bank account details of
staff, it would be unlikely to be unfair to publish details of expenses
incurred in the course of official business, information about pay
bands, or, particularly in the case of senior staff, details of
salaries. While this information clearly does relate to staff
personally, there is a strong public interest in provision of
information about how a public authority has spent public money.

These are not hard and fast rules. While names of officials should
normally be provided on request, if there is some reason to think that
disclosure of even that information would put someone at risk – for
instance confirming the work address of a member of staff who has been
physically threatened – then it may be right not to give out that
information. It may also be relevant to think about the seniority of
staff: the more senior a person is the less likely it will be that to
disclose information about him or her acting in an official capacity
would be unfair.

'E) Formal objections to disclosure
The Data Protection Act gives people the right to object in writing to
the processing or disclosure of their personal data. Such written
objections are often referred to as Section 10 Notices. An organisation
receiving such a notice must comply unless there is some overriding
justification for the processing. In some cases, although an
organisation does not accept that there are valid grounds for
objection,
it may agree not to process or disclose data simply because those are
the wishes of the person concerned.

'If a request for the disclosure of information to which the third
party
has previously objected is received, then, under FOI, the public
authority must review its decision to accept the objection and must
provide a copy of the information unless it is satisfied that the
objection was in fact a valid one.'

 http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk/cms/DocumentUploads/AG%201%20pe
rsonal%20info.pdf

I will keep the CPBF posted on developments. RH
--
Robert Henderson
Blair Scandal website:  http://www.geocities.com/blairscandal/
Personal website:  http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk