Details of all those giving oral evidence have been published on the Justice Committee webpage as:

Maurice Frankel, Campaign for FOI, Alexandra Runswick, Deputy Director, Unlock Democracy, Unit, and Alex Skene, Volunteer, WhatDoTheyKnow; Jim Amos, Honorary Senior Research Associate, and Ben Worthy, Research Associate, UCL Constitution Unit

We don’t know the committee’s plans for taking further evidence, how many sessions there will be etc.

Personally I’d expect the committee to have sessions with the Information Commissioner, representatives of central and local government, and others. It’s anyone’s guess as to how long the process will take and in what format its findings will be released.

The best place to stay up to date is via the committee’s webpages at:

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-archive/justice/

We have asked for permission to publish what we have submitted.

Hopefully we’ll be able to either link to a copy the committee publishes, or publish our submission ourselves, shortly.

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Richard – WhatDoTheyKnow.com volunteer

Many thanks for your comment.

The request you mention has not, as far as I’ve seen, been considered vexatious by any of the authorities to which it has been sent. It appears to be valid request with a serious purpose so shouldn’t in my view be considered vexatious.

As for requests with an apparent commercial motivation, these are permitted by the Freedom of Information Act and the same arguments apply for making them public via our site as other requests – it means the information released becomes more easily accessible and might actually prevent others having to make their own requests for the information.

My view on requests for details of public sector computer hardware needs and contracts which would be of interest to those seeking to compete to provide services is that they are requesting information which ought, in an ideal world, already be proactively published. I think there is potential for the public sector to make savings when buying in services if its requirements are more widely known. There may well overall be cost savings to be made by making this kind of information public.

On occasion we do see people making requests to inappropriate bodies via our site. I don’t think these generally take significant resources to deal with. Often a requestor can be given a response, or pointed in the right direction with a short email.

Part of the problem is the complexity of the UK public sector. Some town and parish council level organisations are actually quite significant, for example Weston-super-Mare Town Council is a substantial organisation with a number of staff. Many people are often unaware of which council is responsible for what, especially in places where there are two-tier systems, eg. County and District Councils

Our site does contain some odd requests, but at least these are being made in public, and we may well be preventing some of these being made to organisations by large numbers of organisations. We are just an intermediary, we can’t really be held responsible for the behaviour of our users, either in terms of what they request or what is done with the information released.

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Richard – WhatDoTheyKnow.com volunteer

I am not commenting on the principles of FOI but merely this site, which as far as I can see has the effect of facilitating time wasters and people who seem to suffer paranoid delusions.

Thanks for your comment. The case you mention has caused some internal debate while we re-examine some of our policies. The user was temporarily suspended while we undertook this discussion.

Broadly speaking, we are not against bulk requests – indeed, we think that, as the resulting information comes into the public domain, they can be useful for all. However, we are aware that very frequent and very numerous requests can be inconvenient to other site users, while also placing a burden on the site infrastructure.

We’ll make sure we update the blog once we have finalised our decisions on how best we handle these types of request.

For example yesterday one user alone sent out 1473 identical FOI requests via your site:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/john_wicker
I notice you appear to have taken some action to prevent them acting further.

So out of those 100,000 requests you mention I wonder how many are telemarketing sales agents misusing the system? 10%? 20%? Perhaps you have some future plans to combat the ones using your site?

To be clear, I’m not against the FOI, just annoying telemarketers.

We know it’d be ideal if Highways Agency road problems could be reported directly to them, but at the moment our systems don’t allow for it. In the meantime we depend on the goodwill of the council and for them to forward the issue on to the correct contact.