FOI and spend data
First published: 21st February 2014
Some years before Spend Network existed I met an FOI officer who told me that 90% of her time was spent providing details of contracts and spending by her Council. It was a moment that stuck with me and it was one of the motivators that made me decide to focus on building Spend Network.
Given that such a large volume of FOI traffic relates to spend and contracts, it is a bit sad and depressing to see so many Government bodies being so late with their spend returns. At the time of writing, 10 of the 17 departments haven’t published spend for December 2013 yet. Six haven’t published spend for November 2013 and four haven’t published for October 2013 or earlier.
Then there’s the Ministry of Justice. The last time they published a spend statement was October 2012, some 16 months ago. In May 2013 we sent an FOI request asking them to publish their data, but they rejected our request on the grounds that the data was tabled for future publication. By August nothing had been published, so we took the case to the Information Commissioner and we’re still waiting for an adjudication on the case.
Its not hard to see that there’s a costly problem here. We’ll keep pushing for answers, but in reality, there needs to be a fast-track process for failing to process key pieces of information such as spend, budgets and organograms.
Update:
MOJ finally relented, but only after the ICO had issued a judgement against them.
Originally published at spendnetwork.github.io.
