On 7 April 2010 15:09, Michael Bimmler <[email protected]> wrote: [snip]
> > Is this legally sound? I have argued in response that the > parliamentary administration does cease to operate during a > dissolution, at least as far as I'm aware, at the very least PICT, the > Information Office and probably the Visitor's Office will continue to > operate, therefore I find it hard to argue that the House of Commons > qua public authority ceases to exist, even if Parliament is dissolved > and then summoned again. The problem here is in the drafting of the FOI Act (and, in my view, in letting lay people draft legislation). The "House of Commons" is almost certainly not a legal person, so applying to it a law designed to work for corporations is going to be problematic - and this is an example of one of those problems. The logical problem is that: (i) if there is no House of Commons, then it cannot be in breach of the act (because it does not exist), but (ii) section 10 of the act makes no provision for time to stop running while Parliament is dissolved - and it could easily have done so. It was to avoid problems like this that the Parliamentary Corporate Bodies Act 1992 was passed. So <shrug> there is no neat answer - a court might decide that the act meant for the administrative staff of the Commons to be complying with this kind of request (otherwise section 10 fails to work and we have an anomaly) or might imply into the statute an exception for the dissolution of Parliament. I have no feel for how that would fall. > > But I'd be interested to hear further opinions on this, I fear that we > get into the unclear waters of distinctions between the Corporate > Officer of the HoC (who is not a public > authority for the purposes of FOIA 2000) and the House of Commons itself. > I'm not sure the distinction is unclear, it may be that practice is. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
