Cabinet Manual gets it wrong on FOI
If you want to know how the UK is run, the Cabinet Office has issued just the thing for you - its draft , which sets out the main laws and conventions affecting the conduct of government.
It is mainly intended as a guide for ministers and civil servants, but the government says it is publishing it generally as part of its agenda for promoting transparency about the workings of the state.
I confess that I haven't yet read the entire 149-page manual since it was released yesterday, but I have looked at the section on freedom of information at the end. And I was surprised to discover that a document of this status contains errors in what it says about the law.
For example, paragraph 389 states that information may be exempt from FOI if it "relates" to defence or international relations or numerous other matters it lists. In fact, for most of these areas, what the actually says is that the exemption can only apply if disclosing the information "would, or would be likely to, prejudice" defence, et cetera.
The same paragraph also asserts that another exemption is "if the cost of complying with the request would exceed £600". Strictly speaking this isn't an "exemption", but putting that more pedantic point to one side, the statement is still extremely misleading.
Under the , the relevant cost to take into account is not the overall cost of complying with the request; it is only the cost of determining whether the information is held, and locating, retrieving and extracting it (which may well be significantly less than the total cost of responding).
It does seem rather strange for a document of this importance to contain legal errors. However, the Cabinet Office . Since I do not know if the Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell is an avid reader of this blog, I have decided to perform my civic duty and will be e-mailing the address provided for sending in comments.
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