The Wardman Wire

One in five of all FOI requests are turned down. 20%! 7,000 FOI requests turned down point blank.

And only 63% were classed as fully “resolvable”. So the other 17% must have been regarded as only partly answerable, for whatever reason. Knowing this government, probably because they just didn’t have a clue what the answer was.

Freedom of information - the concept, ignoring the Act - should mean that anything that is not cost prohibitive to fund out or top secret should be released if requested. And this release should be as quick as possible. In fact, why shouldn’t all of this information be freely available anyway?

That Jack Straw can blithely state that the “flow of information between the Government and the people is fundamental to a vigorous and robust democracy” and yet reside over such a terrible record in actually complying with Freedom of Information shows doubleplusgood doublethink.