The government's Freedom of Information (FoI) Act amendments consultation period closes for submissions today. According to Martin Rosenbaum's BBC FoI blog they now have three months to review the arguments put to it and then announce its response. Gordon Brown will, of course be Prime Minister by this time.
Rosenbaum details that the BBC has argued against, no surprises there really, further restrictions, which would damage its ability to report affectively on the government. Its submission states:
Amending the regulations to restrict access to information has inevitable and important disadvantages – it would prevent valuable FOI disclosures which are in the public interest and it would risk undermining the principles of FOI. This course should only be pursued if there is an even more important need to reduce the administrative burden of FOI. We do not believe that exists. There will always be some inappropriate and burdensome FOI requests, but they do not reach the level which requires a change to the regulations.
Major news organisations like the BBC would be muzzled by the amendments if they came into force because FoI requests would be grouped together and limited, by which organisation they come from. Therefore if BBC Radio 4's Today programme had lodged a series of request and so had a BBC local news programme, they would be grouped together, with one possibly losing out. The upshot of this is that the local news programme may be investigating something of upmost importance to a local community could be kept under wraps because a national news room makes a high number of requests.
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