One request or two
I thought it would be interesting to pick up on two aspects of an FOI story broadcast a few days ago by my colleagues on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One's , as the Scottish government's referendum bill is being published.
the plans the had for a separate body rather than the to supervise a referendum on independence. It also illustrates one little truth about freedom of information - that if two public authorities might hold the information a requester wants, it's worth asking both of them because they may send different material.
The Politics Show story refers to an e-mail from the Scottish government to the commission stating:
"We are now looking at what the question in an independence referendum might be and at some point will need to show we have properly assessed it for intelligibility, neutrality, etc."
(While later the commission stated the government was making no provision to consult others on the question's intelligibility.)
This e-mail was included in the FOI response to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ from the Electoral Commission, but not in the Scottish government's one. It's not clear however whether this is because it was one of those documents held back by the government on the grounds of protecting free and frank communications about policy, or whether it was not located or no longer held.
The process of obtaining the material also reflected one of the problems recently experienced by some FOI applicants to the Scottish government, which provided a rather unhelpful initial response to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s request for "copies of communications". This was turned down as not "a valid request" given a that the gives a right of access to information, not documents. Once the request was reformulated as being for "information" about views exchanged between the two bodies, it was then answered, if only partially.
This approach of the Scottish government was described last month as a "disturbing turn of events" by the . In an , he wrote:
"I have, in the past, commented favourably on the official attitude to freedom of information in Scotland compared to that in Westminster... But it is Scotland which is now going to attract unfavourable attention. I know of no other country in the world where the FoI law does not allow you to make reference to documents when requesting information. People will simply not play a parlour game where you have to identify what you want without using certain words - such as record, minute, report, e-mail, letter or indeed any means by which the information is recorded or could be located."
The Scottish government's was that it is:
"committed to freedom of information, and its underpinning principles of openness and transparent government... The court ruling says that the FOI Act provides a right to obtain information, rather than a right to obtain copies of specific documents, and of course we are now considering the implications of the court ruling in the context of the advice from the commissioner.''
A 
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