Have the First Minister and Deputy First Minister fallen off the wagon again?

Last year, Northern Ireland's Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister  were doing so badly at Freedom of Information requests that the UK Information Commissioner's Office listed them as one of the agencies which were under special monitoring. So how did that work out? Not so well, it seems ...

In December 2012, FOIreland reported on the very poor state of responses to FOI requests by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) in Northern Ireland. Many requests were overdue, some for nearly a year.

Evidently, we weren't the only people who noticed this. Shortly after we reported, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announced that they would be monitoring the OFMDFM to check their compliance.

That was in early 2013. So what happened? Here's a graph that shows the Office's quarterly responses by percentage answered on time / overdue. Can you spot the ICO's 3-month monitoring period?

Looks like the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were good boys for three months. But when the headmaster's back was turned, it was back to smoking behind the bike sheds ...

Phones, trips, banks and blood - FOI roundup

Latest stories in Ireland obtained under Freedom of Information legislation, north and south:

Photo: Duncan Rawlinson

Mobile phone thefts in Derry are up 70%, according to a report in the Derry Journal. 257 phones were reported as stolen in the city in the last year.

After 11 weeks of waiting, the Belfast Telegraph got a response to its request for information from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) about overseas trips. But the information is skimpy. There's little detail as to what the purposes of the trips are or what hotels were used. And the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) is still withholding details of their trips.

In the south, in the Irish Examiner the big story was the European Central Bank's demand that no Freedom of Information requests about the liquidation of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) be answered. The Minister of Finance pointed out that the FOI act provided for information to be withheld for a variety of reasons and IBRC requests would probably be denied under the Act's exemptions. But stories have suggested that the ECB have refused to work with the Department at all if information is disclosed.

Meanwhile the Irish Times reveals a letter suggesting that proposed €1 billion public service cutbacks may reduce economic activity by half of one percent; and a report on the Irish Blood Transfusion Service has found major deficiencies in quality assurance procedures.

Wind farms, Airport VIPs, and gay blood donors - FOI Roundup

This month's crop of FOI requests from Irish newspapers so far

The Irish Times reports that An Taisce (southern equivalent of the UK's National Trust) has objected to 40% of all planning applications for wind farms received by the government's planning body, despite being 'enthusiastic supporters' of the government's plans to generate up to 40% of energy from renewable sources.

The newspaper also reports on various items of government expenditure - with good news for citizens trying to make ends meet: catering for Cabinet meetings, it turns out, averages just €20, with SPAR being one of the main suppliers. At the same time, the Department of the Taoiseach spend €1,700 on cufflinks. The article highlights the fact that €22,000 was spent in six months on VIP treatment for political visitors to Dublin Airport, with former President Mary Robinson a major user of the service.

(The current promotions page at SPAR Ireland reveals that €20 would buy just 20 packets of Hobnobs. That's easily a whole packet per minister. However, if they're willing to share, there should be enough for a cup of Barry's tea each as well.)

Meanwhile, north of the border, both the Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter covered the decision of the UK Information Commissioner to order disclosure of the legal advice received by Health Minister Edwin Poots on the subject of blood donations by gay men. Legal advice is usually prevented from disclosure by Section 42 of the FOI Act, so it's unusual for the Commissioner to decide that the public interest is in favour of disclosure: the key issue here seems to be that in the rest of the UK the policy is now to accept donations from men who have been celibate for a year, yet Northern Ireland retains a lifetime ban. The Minister is said to be considering an appeal. Interesting, if the appeal is successful, a decision on whether to veto disclosure would have to be made jointly by the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, which has never happened before.

Other stories revealed recently under FOI (and published already via the FOIreland Twitter account, @FOIreland)

Irish Times - senior civil servant 'had an inappropriate level of contact' with Barclay tycoons; and the paper is told that releasing information on the horse meat scandal would not be in the public interest.

Irish Medical Times - representatives of the National Office of Clinical Audit are concerned that results of clinical audits will have to be disclosed under Freedom of Information legislation. (“We are advised by senior counsel that while Freedom of Information requests may well be denied, refusals may result in challenges in courts.") [NOTE: to read this article, you have to pretend to be a medical professional, because the people who run the Irish Medical Times website are idiots]

Irish Independent - retired civil servants have been paid more than €1.3 million for conducting job interviews; and Irish universities have spent €1.7 million on rats and mice for medical experiments.

The Detail: fire crews in Northern Ireland take as much as four times as long to respond to emergencies in rural areas than in urban ones.

25 Things We Know Now about Northern Ireland

The website What Do They Know allows people to send Freedom of  Information requests direct, online, to public authorities. Here is a selection of things we know now about Northern Ireland, based on recent requests using What Do They Know.

1. The  Northern Ireland  Civil  Service does  not  have  a  policy  on people  in  a  close  personal  relationship  working  together.
2. Craigavon Borough Council asks such staff to declare such relationships, but does not record them despite this being proposed as a policy in a report highly critical of the council.
3. The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland has a policy – apparently – of neither confirming nor denying whether individuals identified in their investigations are police informants. But if such a policy exists, it is not actually written down.
4. Newry and Mourne District Council (‘SAVE PAPER! PLEASE THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT!’) have 3-4 Lever Arch files of material on the naming of a playground after hunger striker Raymond McCreesh … which they printed out and sent to the requester.
5. In the last financial year, the Northern Ireland Policing Board had 22,623 words translated into Irish, and only 32 words into Ulster Scots.
6. Northern Ireland uses around 246 million carrier bags a year. The Department of the Environment’s levy on carrier bags is expected to raise £2.3 million in a year.
7. The Police Service of Northern Ireland had arrested 195 and charged 164 in connection with flag protests by 20 February.
8. Northern Ireland Housing Executive tenants are not specifically prohibited from flying flags on their homes.
9. Belfast City Council did not charge the company managing the Christmas Market in City Hall any fee when they extended it by three days, to make up for the impact of flag protests on traders. They did this because they believed it would attract people back into the city centre.
10. The Council considers it would take 24 hours of staff time to find the names of all the companies approached since 2006 to tender for developing its website.
11. Peter Tallack, a dog expert in the case of the ‘pit-bull type’ dog Lennox, which was put down last year by Belfast City Council, was paid a total of £10,598.57 in respect of training, court appearances, dog examinations and travel.
12. Banbridge Borough Council have still not responded to a request from last November about dog fouling statistics.
13. Belfast Education and Library Board has still not replied to a query about construction projects.
14. Lisburn City Council has two non-white employees, out of 525.
15. Civil Service departments spend quite a lot of money on media monitoring, from the Department of Social Development which spent £7,340.43, to the Department of Education which spent £15,884.88. The Department of Justice, however, was way out of line: it spent £60,667.
16. In 2012, Queen’s University Belfast made 412 offers to students for its 262 places in Medicine.
17. The University has a scoring system for interviews for its dentistry courses. However it believes it is not in the public interest to disclose how it works. Definitely not.
18. The Deputy Chief Constable of Northern Ireland does NOT have a superinjunction of any kind.
19. The Northern Health and Social Care Trust has paid out more than £8 million in legal settlements for clinical negligence over the past 5 years.
20. On 27 December last, in Accident and Emergency at Causeway Hospital, between 5.30pm and midnight, the average time before triage was 35 mins, and then 168 minutes before seeing a doctor (Category 4).
21. In the last five years, 5 out of 17 grievances and 6 out of 8 dignity at work cases in the Department of Education were fully or partly upheld.
22. The highest-paid staff member of the University of Ulster is paid nearly fifteen times as much as the lowest-paid.
23. There are 24 children in Belfast primary schools whose home language is Somali.
24. Ballymoney Borough Council has issued just two Fixed Penalty Notices for dog fouling since 2005.
25. Two Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland have bought toilet rolls direct from a supplier, possibly because of shortages in the regional warehousing.

Slow, Slow, Slow ...

"Our Department’s performance compares favourably with that of other jurisdictions," Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness told his party colleague, Cathal Ó hOisín, in the Northern Ireland Assembly back in March, when asked about timeliness of responses to Freedom of Information requests. It turns out he was being economical with the truth - on a scale that would put Scrooge to shame.

The Minister pointed out that the Welsh Government responded to just 75% of requests on time, while both the Scottish Government and Whitehall managed just 84%. He compared these to the response rate of 88% for his department.

This sounds impressive - until you delve into the details. The 88% statistic relates to the entire period from 2005 to 2010. When Mr Ó hOisín asked for a more recent update, the Minister simply ignored this. It's not hard to see why: the statistics for 2011 are, quite frankly, disgraceful. The OFMDFM Annual Report on Freedom of Information shows that, of 168 requests received, just 70 were answered on time. That's a total of 42%. What's more, 18 requests - 11% of the total, are listed as 'still being processed'.The report is undated, but appears to have been published in October this year.

This is an astonishingly poor performance from the Department. Not only were almost three out of five requests were not answered in time, but more than one in ten requests were still unanswered ten months after the end of the year.

Maybe on Planet McGuinness that counts as a favourable response rate. Not anywhere else.

(For background to this, see my previous entry)

Update: on the same day as this was posted, the Information Commissioner's Office announced that the FOI performance of the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister will be monitored by them.

A Fragile Flower

How serious are Northern Ireland’s First Minister and Deputy First Minister about transparency? Not very, it seems. To take 320 days to answer a request might be a one-off error; but foot-dragging in a number of recent FOI responses suggests the Ministers approach disclosure with all the enthusiasm of a sulky teenager scribbling homework on the way to school – and nobody seems to be doing anything about it.

The long delay to Jeffrey Dudgeon’s request, finally delivered a day before they would have been forced to disclose by a court, was clearly not a case of mere sloppiness, a fact no doubt evident to the Information Commissioner, whose growing exasperation at the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) can be read through the polite lines of repeated Decision Notices:

12 May 2011 – after an internal review was still uncompleted after more than 70 days:

“The Commissioner would also expect a public authority to inform a complainant if the internal review was going to take longer than 20 working days and explain why. The Commissioner would remind the public authority of its obligations in this regard.”

24 May 2011 – a January request was still under consideration by the Minister’s Private Offices. The Office was unable to say when it would be able to respond.

“The Commissioner would … remind OFMDFM that the Act does not provide for such an extension to the statutory time limit. The process of seeking such approval must be completed within the time limits set out in the Act.” 

4 July 2011 – An enquiry from the previous October had resulted in a review for ministerial approval by January, but nothing more was heard until a request from the Commissioner in June, when it was promptly provided.

“The Commissioner notes that this is the third Decision Notice he has issued in three months relating to a failure by OFMDFM to respond to a request. The Commissioner has expressed his concern to OFMDFM and will consider whether further action is necessary.”

26 September 2011 – a July response was still outstanding after two months.

“Prior to this decision the Commissioner has issued three Decision Notices in the past six months which record OFMDFM’s failure to comply with the Act in respect of timescales for response. The Commissioner expects this pattern of non-compliance to be addressed by OFMDFM.”

24 October 2011 – four long-overdue requests. Three were from September the previous year, the other from December.

“Prior to this decision the Information Commissioner has issued at least three decision notices in the previous six months which record the failure of OFMDFM to comply with FOIA in respect of timescales for response. The Information Commissioner expects this pattern of non-compliance to be addressed by OFMDFM.”

(By the standards of decision notices, that’s pretty much steam coming out of the Commissioner’s ears)

12 December 2011 - two months later, another failure to meet the statutory timetable.

"despite agreeing to disclose the financial information OFMDFM did not do so until three months later. The Information Commissioner reminds OFMDFM of its obligations in relation to the statutory time limits in the FOIA."

16 July 2012 – after six months of quiet, the Commissioner feels compelled to raise his voice again, with a request from January was still uncompleted:

“The Commissioner is particularly disappointed that OFMDFM has failed to respond to his correspondence regarding this complaint. The Commissioner considers it important to give public authorities an opportunity to reconsider its handling of the case before issuing a decision notice. Many public authorities take this opportunity to rectify procedural failings, or provide additional explanatory information to the complainant. However that has not happened in this case”

The Commissioner, in such circumstances, is entitled to call upon a public authority to sign an undertaking to improve their behaviour, like this one from the Welsh Assembly. But instead, he again simply “reminds OFMDFM of its obligations in relation to the statutory time limits in the FOIA.”

It’s not just on the Information Commissioner’s website that this can be seen: over at What Do They Know, requesters have been facing the same approach – consistently being told that long overdue enquiries were ‘still under consideration’ – as if they had never heard of the Commissioner.

There’s good evidence that this is not simply incompetence or slack management – in fact, that the culture of the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister is one of resistance to enquiries, and this may well be a product of Northern Ireland’s peculiar politics.

With what Mick Fealty of the Slugger O’Toole website calls the ‘fragile flower defence’, those currently in charge like to claim that the province needs special treatment to defend it: that certain disclosures “could prevent the maturing of the Executive in Northern Ireland” because they would threaten the cohesion of the mandatory coalition government.

The Belfast News Letter, which says the Executive wrote this year to Westminster asked to be allowed, like the government in the South, to charge for requests (which caused an immediate decline in their number there), seems sceptical about this claim, pointing out that the former DUP First Minister, Ian Paisley, criticised what he called ‘lazy journalists’ using FOI after his son’s close business relationship with a developer was revealed using the Act. Interestingly, his Sinn Féin counterpart, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness told the Assembly this year that ‘There is absolutely no doubt that freedom of information allows people to abuse their access to information.’ What this suggests is not a genuine concern for security but rather a grudging approach to transparency.

Finally, in order to find out more, I submitted an FOI request to the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, asking how many requests this year had been overdue and for how long.

Guess what? The response is now overdue.

An interesting question

A close look at one of the What Do They Know requests for the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) brings up a fascinating question - without the answer.

On 21 May 2012, an enquirer called Ben Brown asked a series of questions. One, for instance, was about the overseas travel costs of the department for the period 2007-2011; a fairly routine kind of request. But this one had a backstory.

It turns out that this was not the first time it had been asked. On 23 May 2011, this question was asked in the Northern Ireland Assembly by the Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister. On 5 December he wrote about it on his blog, listing it as one of a series of questions in the Assembly which had not been answered despite the 10 working day limit specifed in the Assembly's standing orders. On 17 May this year, a press release on the party's website pointed out that there was still no answer available.

Mr Brown got no reply until 2 July, well past the limit allowed by the law. All the questions were refused, on a single basis: that they were identical to Assembly questions, and to answer them would breach section 36(2)(c) of the FOI Act - that it would prejudice the conduct of public affairs, because it would undermine the workings of the Assembly by disclosing 'unvalidated information'.

That strikes me as a very dubious response. Firstly, in principle an FOI request should be responded to without reference to what might have been asked in the Assembly; the two are separate information regimes. Secondly, it should be answered within 20 working days - which would have been adequate to respond in the Assembly as well. Mr Brown would have been within his rights to ask for a review and if that did not produce the information, take it to the Information Commissioner. Instead, he rephrased his questions and asked for this to be treated as a new request - a tactical mistake, I am afraid. He got a response on 31 October to say his request was 'still under consideration'.

This strikes me as a very poor approach from the OFMDFM. It's annoying to see requesters with a good case palmed off with this. I doubt very much that the Information Commissioner would let them away with it.

Incidentally, Mr Allister finally got his response on 21st September - and not a very helpful one: "Information is not held on the departmental accounting system at the level of detail requested and could only be provided at disproportionate cost." That may well be true, but if so the answer could have been provided in 1 working day!

A very poor showing

A very poor showing this week from the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister:

Stormont department took 320 days to answer FoI request

Apparently, the Office took nearly a year to answer the request and only responded to avoid being forced to do so in court. That's not very encouraging.

A look at the OFMDFM responses on the What Do They Know? website suggests this may not be an isolated incident. Several long-delayed responses, with excuses such as 'We are not in a position to respond to your request at this time as it is still under consideration.' Some poor-quality answers, too.

If so, it's not perhaps surprising: the Deputy First Minister appears not to be a fan of Freedom of Information, telling the Assembly members that 'There is absolutely no doubt that freedom of information allows people to abuse their access to information.'

I have submitted a request to find out how many requests have been received, and how many were overdue. Is this an isolated incident or is there a pattern? I think we should be told.