how many ferrero roche chocolates are served up each year by british ambassadors around the world?
fancy a man in uniform? how many eligible bachelors are there amongst the hampshire police force?
there’s a fuss, right now, about whether these questions are eligible for a proper response under the british freedom of information act. what is reasonable?
it seems to me that the only consideration should be whether the data can be reasonably acquired, rather than question the reason behind the request itself. so i wonder.
how would the foreign and commonwealth office gather such information. i guess every embassy has someone responsible for procurement. i guess there are occasions when the FCO HQ communicates to these people as a group. proc_managers@fco.gov.uk or something. one junior official sends one email requesting response in 2 days. gets said responses back, taps numbers into spreadsheet. there are 200 countries. it’s not hard. the cost over the admin fee that must be paid on these requests is probably pretty small. and i bet there aren’t many.
the second example is one HR department. do they record the marital status of each officer? yes. how hard is that query? potential profit, even, for the fuzz.
over time the expectations of what information can be provided will rise, if only because technology is going to provide more and more data, and more and more ways to get at it. it’s all going open. openness should be the default. you should need a strong reason not to respond. these reasons nestle in the legislation - public safety, commercial confidentiality (over-used), data protection act (cripplingly over-used) etc. they are all testable in the courts.
not why, but why not?
