On 23 December 2011 09:40, Stephen Booth <[email protected]> wrote: > Interesting, I've had a few FOI requests refused on basis of costs where the > redaction was the biggest factor in the cost. The biggest inflating factor > being that a senior manager would have to be the one who collated and > redacted the information as the raw information may contain commercially > confidential information.
The costs must be calculated @ £25/hr irrespective of the actual salary costs. I've seen examples on WDTK of refusals where the authority incorrectly used the supplier's daily charge rate of £1000 per day as the basis for charging... > Another reason I've seen used, which I think we will see more often in the > future, is where a request covers a service which is delivered via a private > sector company (which may be wholly owned by the public sector body) so the > response is that as the FOI only covers public sector bodies no information > from the company can be supplied and any information held by the public body > will be commercially confidential and there cannot be released. Companies wholly-owned by public authorities are already separately covered by FOI (with a few exemptions to this rule, eg the BBC). Irrespective of this, any info held by private companies is covered under FOI, as long as it is held "on behalf of" the public authority Whether information is commercially confidential or not is a separate matter, and there is a fairly high threshold for it to apply. This exemption has 2 separate tests - one for whether the info release would prejudice the public authority or the supplier's commercial interests, and another for whether the disclosure is in the public interest or not. Cheers Alex - WhatDoTheyKnow.com volunteer [email protected] [NB: subscribed to this list via my personal email address] _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
