³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

There will now be an intermission. More follows in the second week of August.

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Following my post about central government departments which have been slow in their dealings with the Information Commissioner's Office, here is a list of other public authorities with extreme delays in particular cases.

As with the other list, this was sent to me following an FOI request I submitted. The ICO wishes to add that both lists are 'very much information that has been informally gathered for internal briefing purposes and as such shouldn’t be considered as definitive statements on this subject'.

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Last night's revealed the keen interest of officials from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in the idea of a casino on the site of the Dome, a new twist to the latest John Prescott tale.

This revelation stemmed from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act. So was this a speedily made and answered FOI request from Newsnight? No - actuallly the documents had been sitting for months on the website of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

It was Newsnight's political reporter David Grossman who recalled that DCMS had made FOI disclosures about the Dome in the past and had the bright idea of looking through them to see if they would shed new light on the role of Prescott and his officials.

He found .

It's an interesting outcome of the existence of disclosure logs, used by some public authorities to put their FOI disclosures on their websites. At first some journalists regarded them suspiciously as a device to try to deny journalists their FOI scoops. It's becoming increasingly clear - see also this - that disclosure logs are a valuable journalistic resource, at least for the more assiduous amongst us.

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The government departments with the worst record of excessive delays in their dealings with the Information Commissioner are the Foreign Office and the Department for Constitutional Affairs, I can reveal.

This is according to a list of cases maintained by the Commissioner's office to monitor instances where departments have been particularly slow in dealing with the ICO.

The Commissioner Richard Thomas disclosed that his staff had been compiling such a list when he referred to his at the FOI Live conference in May. I put in an FOI request to the ICO for a copy of this list and am publishing it today.

The list features 25 examples of excessive delays. The two departments which crop up most frequently are the Foreign Office and the DCA, each with five cases.

The document shows how in several cases the ICO has to keep pestering the departments involved with chasing letters while the departments miss deadlines, seek repeated extensions, provide partial responses or fail to respond altogether.

It records that in one case 'FCO have so far taken 12 months to not even answer a request from ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ reporter' - that's me.

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the introduction of freedom of information in the United States.

Some interesting tackles the question of who makes most use of FOI in the US. The answer: in this latest survey over 60 per cent of FOI requests came from businesses pursuing their commercial interests. (The media accounted for 6 per cent of requests).

This would seem to be in stark contrast with the position here. According to Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, the evidence suggests that the largest category of users is ordinary members of the public. And the Scottish Information Commissioner Kevin Dunion also says that most of his complaints come from ordinary individuals.

(I don't know whether government ministers count as ordinary folk).

There are doubtless several factors behind this comparison, one of which may be that the US survey covered FOI at a federal level, while in the UK we are also talking about requests at the local as well as national level.

Nevertheless the discrepancy is very large: it seems clear that FOI is a business tool in the US in a way in which it just isn't in the UK.

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If you want to find out more about the details of a local authority's finances, it's worth reading the recent post on council spending on , author of 'Your Right to Know'.

She's correct about the power of this obscure 'right to know' provision of the Audit Commission Act. As someone who has used it in the past, I can confirm it meets with bafflement on the part of many council employees.

But now that they have to abide by freedom of information generally, perhaps that will start to change? Perhaps councils will even start giving some more publicity to it.

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