Today's November issue front page story on the Labour government planning to reduce access to public information, is a sad tale of a government out of touch and the mis-use of the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.
The box text on Frivolous Requests is both funny and saddening. Using FoI to trace bachelors within the Hampshire constabulary, or the number of times people have been charged with having sex with animals in Wale, merely adds fuel to the argument of this government that it is correct in reducing our free rights to information. There could be a genuine reason behind researching how much is spent on a particular brand of chocolate, but why was it narrowed down to one brand?
If there are to be changes made to FoI we need to see a much wider range of statistics on how the act is being used, not just a set of hand picked queries bound to anger the readership of the Daily Mail.
This government has no respect for the public and their right to information, that was clearly seen in the watered down nature of the original FoI, and now they plan to reduce our rights even further. Information professionals need to be front line fighters to ensure the information they manage is freely available to the public and not abused by the Labour party.
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