14 June 2013
Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude announces “new commitments on open data”, including this:
data held by the Charity Commission on the annual returns of charities in England and Wales is to be made available as free open data by March 2014. The data will give basic details, including headline income and expenditure, for all registered charities and will show how charities with an income of over £500,000 allocate their revenue across fundraising and governance, charitable activities and what they retain for future use.
13 May 2014
No sign of any open data release from the Charity Commission. I send a FOI request to Cabinet Office, asking for:
Straight forward, right? The minister made a public commitment, so someone in the Cabinet Office Transparency Team must surely be following up on delivery.
Under the FOI Act Cabinet Office has 20 working days to provide a substantive response to my information request.
27 June 2014
I send a reminder to Cabinet Office that their response is overdue.
7 July 2014
I request an internal review of the handling of my information request on the basis that, without explanation, I have had no response (other than acknowledgement of receipt).
7 August 2014
Still nothing from Cabinet Office. I submit a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office. (There’s a special form.) This is my first ever contact with ICO and a watershed moment in my personal development as a minor annoyance to central government.
15 August 2014
An ICO case officer writes to Cabinet Office and gives them ten working days to respond to my information request. ICO notes that:
In the event of other, similar complaints, the Commissioner may consider taking enforcement action under section 52 of the Act.
8 September 2014
I email the ICO case officer pointing out that more than ten working days have passed and Cabinet Office hasn’t responded:
Cabinet Office has not provided any substantive response either to my original information request or to my request for an internal review of the handling of that request. I appreciate the Information Commissioner cannot meaningfully review a response unless the public authority actually makes one. However if there is nothing further the ICO can do at this point, other than further urge the Cabinet Office to respond, I would welcome a decision notice for my complaint.
9 October 2014
Having heard nothing from either Cabinet Office or ICO in the past month, I ask the ICO case officer for an update on progress.
Within hours the ICO case officer sends me a copy of a decision notice issued to Cabinet Office (and dated the previous day):
The Information Commissioner’s decision is that the Cabinet Office breached section 10 of the FOIA as it has failed to provide a response to the request.
The Commissioner requires the Cabinet Office to take the following steps
to ensure compliance with the legislation:
- Issue a response to the request under the FOIA by either complying with section 1(1) or issuing a valid refusal notice.
The public authority must take these steps within 35 calendar days of
the date of this decision notice. Failure to comply may result in the
Commissioner making written certification of this fact to the High Court
pursuant to section 54 of the Act and may be dealt with as a contempt
of court.
16 November 2014
Having heard nothing from either Cabinet Officer or ICO following the decision notice, I write again to the ICO case officer:
The period of 35 calendar days specified in the notice has now expired and I have still had no response from the Cabinet Office.
May I ask that the Commissioner notifies the High Court of the Cabinet Office’s failure to comply, in line with section 54 of the FOI Act? I would appreciate confirmation of that and any other further steps ICO is in a position to take.
(Some context: as far as I can tell, the Information Commissioner has never notified the High Court of the failure of any public authority to comply with a decision notice.)
8 December 2014
I receive a letter in response to my original information request, from “FOI Team” at Cabinet Office.
The response provides the text of a single email from the Charity Commission to Cabinet Office:
“Before the end of June, we will launch a new beta version of the charities search facility. This will deliver the commitments made by the government in June last year to make information about charities easier to find and use. The added functionality will allow subsets of the public data set to be downloaded as a CSV file and whole public dataset downloaded direct to the user’s PC rather than having to be sent on disk. The work is almost complete – we have been delayed by the need to make changes to the Commission’s core database and this being one of many changes that have been required of that system by several projects.
“In the meantime, the public data from the register continues to be available via the Find charities option on our website. The site also contains information about obtaining and using a full electronic copy of the public data set which we will supply on disk if requested.”
Neither the names of the correspondents nor the date of the email are included in the Cabinet Office response.
The letter makes no mention of the date of my information request, the lateness of Cabinet Office’s response, or the ICO decision notice. In the cover email only:
Please accept our apologies in the lateness of this reply.
9 December 2014
I email the ICO case officer to led him know I have had a response from Cabinet Office but am not satisfied with its completeness, and ask for advice on next steps.
The ICO case officer says the delay in response “will be recorded” but if I’m dissatisfied with the outcome I need to request an internal review by Cabinet Office before ICO will look at the response.
I request an internal review from Cabinet Office:
Please review whether Cabinet Office has identified and provided all correspondence that falls within scope of my information request.
It seems unlikely that the single e-mail from the Charity Commission, quoted by Cabinet Office, was received unprompted and that Cabinet Office made no reply. However please confirm if that was the case.
With respect to the single e-mail identified, it is my position that Cabinet Office’s reply to my information request should have included a copy of the complete e-mail rather than just a quote from the body of the e-mail. In particular, Cabinet Office’s reply omits the date of the e-mail and the names of the correspondents; that information is clearly within scope of my information request.
The internal review should also consider the timeliness of Cabinet Office’s reply to my information request, and Cabinet Office’s lack of response to my original request for an internal review of the handling of that request (dated 7 July 2014).
Remember, I requested an internal review previously. But that one doesn’t count because at that point Cabinet Office hadn’t responded to my information request. This time I should be able to get an internal review because there’s actually a substantive response for Cabinet Office to review.
11 February 2015
Nothing from Cabinet Office.
ICO’s standing advice is that public authorities should complete internal reviews within 40 working days. I submit a new complaint to ICO, and make a suggestion:
Given that the ICO’s decision notice and other representations appear to have made little impression on the Cabinet Office, you might consider taking a more robust line with this further complaint.
23 April 2015
A new ICO case officer writes to say my complaint has been passed to her. She sets out the scope of her investigation and I write back with some comments.
27 May 2015
I receive an internal review response from Roger Smethurst at Cabinet Office. The substance of the outcome is as follows:
Some other points from Mr Smethurst’s letter:
“I am very sorry for the delay in responding – the Cabinet Office changed ICT systems in late 2014 and a failure in the automatic forwarding of emails meant we did not receive you internal review request until it was forwarded to us by the Information Commissioner’s Office.”
“I understand that the majority of communications between the Cabinet Office and the Charity Commission were on an informal basis.”
“I do apologise for our mishandling of your request. We have not provided an acceptable service in response to either your original request or your request for an internal review. I accept that we must do better in future.”