INTERNAL REVIEW OF GCDA’S HANDLING OF FOI REQUEST 0000087
I have been asked by the Government Car and Despatch Agency (GCDA) to conduct a review of GCDA’s handling of FOI Case 0000087. This review was requested by the FOI applicant, Georgina Appleton, who was dissatisfied with the way the GCDA handled the case.
Ms Appleton’s e-mail of 27 November to James Padden in GCDA, in which she requested an internal review, asked the following questions or made the following points:
1) GCDA appears to have inconsistently applied section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, since in some released documents the names of staff below director level are present, and in others have been redacted;
2) the team briefings released appear to be items from the GCDA intranet and are not team briefings at all;
3) can assertions made in internal GCDA correspondence about Ms Appleton’s motivation for making the FOI request be justified? Have GCDA’s prejudices about the motivation behind the request caused them to mishandle it?
4) was FOI training for GCDA staff “hastily arranged” so that a more positive reply about the position on staff training could be given?
5) What procedure or legislation justifies GCDA ignoring Ms Appleton’s complaint about the way in which her original FOI request (ref 0000067) was handled?
The FOI complaints procedure, a copy of which was sent to Ms Appleton, states that applicants may complain within two months “about the way in which [the] request for information was handled and/or about the decision not to disclose all or part of the information requested.”
The majority of Ms Appleton’s questions above appear to relate to dissatisfaction with the way in which her request was handled, rather than any complaint that information has not been provided, with the possible exception of question 2, where she believes that the information on team briefings supplied may have been an attempt to mislead her.
Dealing with her points in turn:
Question 1
I agree with Ms Appleton that GCDA has been inconsistent in its application of section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, since some documents (admittedly only a few out of the voluminous material supplied) contain names of staff below director level. This was an error: the names should not have been released. Ms Appleton asks what action will be taken in pursuit of this apparent breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. This is a matter for the individuals concerned. I understand that they are relaxed about the oversight and are unlikely to take the matter any further.
Question 2
Like most Government bodies, GCDA briefs its staff through a variety of means, ranging from the intranet, which is a quick way of communicating with the whole team, to oral briefings to smaller groups. Ms Appleton’s original FOI request dated 13 August was addressed to the “Government Car and Despatch Agency” and asked for copies of the “last three team briefings.” This was interpreted (correctly in my view) as a request for copies of the most recent three briefings addressed to the GCDA team as a whole. These were the briefings posted on the GCDA intranet, giving staff information about i) a new software update improving the allocation of “jobs”: ie the provision of cars to ferry Ministers from one place to another; ii) the introduction of the general DfT computer system (ETHOS) to the GCDA and the help available to GCDA staff to become familiar with it; and iii) the annual staff survey, along with a request to complete it.
Ms Appleton’s e-mail of 27 November states that these are news items from the GCDA intranet rather than briefings “and in any case seem to be for the internal readership”. I do not consider that these implied criticisms hold weight: the whole purpose of an intranet (as opposed to a website available on the internet) is to communicate to staff. And team briefings are by definition aimed at the “internal readership”. The items concerned were not pure “news” items as such, since they contained information directly relevant to the GCDA’s staff’s work and which staff were expected to act on (the classic stuff of a briefing).
I am satisfied that the documents released by the GCDA in response to Ms Appleton’s request for copies of team briefings were the appropriate ones and in no sense an attempt to mislead.
Question 3
The e-mail referred to by Ms Appleton states that the author “suspects[s] that the requestor [ie Ms Appleton] has a particular grievance against GCDA” and further suspects that “the complainant will do their utmost to exact as much as possible, not due to a genuine interest in the information, but for reasons outside the spirit of the Act.” Ms Appleton asks if these assertions can be justified.
In fact, the author did not say that Ms Appleton had a grievance against GCDA, or that she would do her utmost to exact as much as possible”: the author simply “suspected” that this might be the case. It was an expression of an opinion rather than a statement of fact. The same e-mail acknowledged that GCDA’s original response to Ms Appleton had been “poor” and “not handled well”. It is clear that this e-mail was intended to be an internal one only and not for reading by Ms Appleton, although since it later became the subject of a further FOI request from Ms Appleton, it was released to her. The tone of the e-mail in some respects might be unfortunate but it is important to note that its author was in fact the person trying to rectify the original poor handling of the case. It was legitimate for the author to reflect on the motivation behind Ms Appleton’s requests: part of the function of an FOI reviewer is to determine whether requests are over-burdensome and/or vexatious.
The author was not responsible for the handling of the original request of 13 August, so his or her opinion of Mrs Appleton’s motives cannot have played a part in how that original request was handled. In fact, insofar as Ms Appleton’s original request for information is concerned, there is no evidence of any particular motive being imputed to Ms Appleton: her request was simply handled poorly in that a mass of material was provided to her without a proper covering letter explaining which material related to which question.
Question 4
The terms of Question 4 are confusing. Ms Appleton’s e-mail of 24 September requested (question 4) a list of the specific training undertaken by the FOI team. James Padden’s reply of 22 October set out the answer. The imputation of Ms Appleton’s letter of 27 November is that that answer should have described the situation on training pertaining on 24 September, not the one on 22 October and that training had hastily been arranged between those two dates in order to conceal the GCDA’s lack of experience. This is not the case. The situation on 24 September was that two members of GCDA staff – those dealing with FOI cases - had received FOI training. However, following the poor handling of Ms Appleton’s August request, it was decided to extend FOI training more widely in GCDA, to try to reduce the chances of error in the future. A further 10 members of staff received FOI training after 24 September.
GCDA’s response of 22 October was an accurate statement of fact. Staff directly involved with FOI processes had received training well before 24 September; further members of staff were trained between 24 September and 22 October. I do not consider that the letter of 22 October constitutes an attempt to mislead Ms Appleton.
Question 5
To answer Question 5 as worded – “Under what procedure or legislation did you think that ignoring my complaint would be the best course of action?” – would be to accept the assumption that GCDA indeed thought that ignoring Ms Appleton’s complaint was the best way forward. My reading of the papers suggests that this assumption is unjustified. The string of internal e-mails (the “schedule of correspondence” provided to Ms Appleton) shows that, far from ignoring the complaint, GCDA devoted large amounts of staff time and effort to dealing with it. Ms Appleton complained in an e-mail of 15 September about the handling of her original FOI request. There followed ten internal e-mails dated 16 September in GCDA which discussed how to react to the complaint (mainly by signposting more clearly the voluminous documents required to respond to Ms Appleton’s original request). There then seems to have been a hiatus until 23 September, when a further reminder e-mail was received from Ms Appleton. A response, apologising for the unsatisfactory reply to the original FOI request, was sent on 28 September. With hindsight, it is unfortunate that Ms Appleton’s e-mail of 15 September was not dealt with more swiftly: however, there is no evidence that GCDA took any decision to ignore her complaint. Far from it, the flurry of internal correspondence caused by both her e-mails of 15 and 23 September shows that GCDA was fully alive to the need to respond to it, as they did on 28 September, less than two weeks in fact after she made her complaint.
Conclusion
Ms Appleton’s FOI request of 13 August (case 000067) could have been handled better by GCDA, in that she was simply provided with the material she had asked for, without a substantive covering letter explaining which material referred to which question. GCDA initiated work to rectify this immediately on receipt of her complaint of 15 September, although a further prompt from Ms Appleton was received on 23 September before the GCDA sent a letter of apology on 28 September, promising a revised response which would provide the information in a clearly sign-posted format. GCDA fully acknowledged that their initial response had been unsatisfactory: their further e-mail of 6 October, providing the information in a clear format, rectified the matter.
Ms Appleton’s request for further information, made in her e-mail of 23 September, opened a new FOI case 000087. The GCDA responded on 22 October with the information requested. Nevertheless, Ms Appleton was dissatisfied with that response, as she made clear in her e-mail of 27 November in which she requested an internal review and posed five questions relating to the information and the way in which her request had been handled.
It is those five questions which I have examined above. My conclusion, as must be evident from that analysis, is that the GCDA’s response of 22 October was a full one and handled in an entirely satisfactory way. There was an error made in that some names of staff below director level were not redacted, but the damaged party in that instance are the members of staff concerned, not Ms Appleton.
I find that Ms Appleton has no legitimate grounds for complaint about the way in which her request for information (FOI case 000087) was handled or about the extent of disclosure made.
Nicholas Denton
Senior Civil Servant
Department for Transport
17 December 2010