Names of weapons sales officers must be released
Apr 26, 2006 Defence, FOI in the news
The Guardian has managed to get a meaningful decision out of the Information Commissioner. This ruling sets a good precedent for a number of cases where public officials are refusing to be identified.
Watchdog orders MoD to unmask arms sales officers
By David Leigh and Rob Evans
The Guardian, 26 April 2006
The information commissioner, Richard Thomas, yesterday [...]
List of FOI officers for US Government
Apr 21, 2006 Book Updates
Anyone can make an FOIA request to the American federal government; you don’t need to be a citizen or even living in the country. Journalists in the UK still often use the American law to get information about the UK such as clinical trial results on pharmaceutical drugs (from the Federal Drug Administration) or oceanography [...]
With friends like these…?
Apr 20, 2006 Access Laws
I’ve been doing a little digging on some ‘users’ of the Government’s new FOI User’s Group. It seems our man representing the business user (Anthony Kenny from Intellect UK) is in fact a supplier. Ideally, a small business group should be in this position as they are the primary business user of FOI. Small [...]
New Training – May 12, 2006
Apr 20, 2006 Training
I’ll be running a course at the National Union of Journalists 12 May 2006 from 10am-4.30pm at the NUJ headquarters in London. The course covers all aspects of the Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulations (EIRs) with particular emphasis on making the laws work for you in practice. I’ll suggest advice [...]
Selection secrecy for FOI users group
Apr 12, 2006 Uncategorized
The members of the Government’s FOI Users Group has only one independent representative of users, according to a document released to me under Freedom of Information.
I filed the request after the government department in charge of the FOI law (the Department for Constitutional Affairs) refused previous requests for the membership or selection procedure. [...]
Article: MPs’ expenses
Apr 10, 2006 Articles, Central Government
There’s nothing private about an MP’s expenses
Independent, 10 April 2006
By Heather Brooke
Few of us would assume we could claim more than £120,000 in expenses every year without handing over receipts to the boss. Yet that’s exactly what Westminster MPs are doing, forgetting that it’s the public who put up the £80 million claimed [...]
