Mr. Ed Hammond:

There has never been a fee regime in Britain for freedom of information requests, and they have been free on demand since the outset, regardless of cost. The British Government was toying with the idea of introducing fees and the justice committee investigation came out relatively strongly against that as an approach. As one would expect, many witnesses were against the idea. Interestingly, there is something of a movement for fees from central Departments and less so from local government, which may be surprising. There is not a significant impetus for introducing fees, partially because the benefits are marginal. The argument is that with the amount it costs to establish a system of fees and to collect fees, as the amount charged to individuals is so low, it would not be especially cost-effective to do so. There may be different evidence in Ireland but as we have never had a fee system here, the basis is mainly on guess work. That is the assumption being followed anyway.

The idea against fees is more philosophical rather than anything else. The argument is that this data is public and the justification for a fees regime is difficult to support. Arguably, the fee may be to cut the cost but part of the duty of a public body or organisation should be to respond to requests for information from the public, recognising that the public has a stake in that organisation as citizens. This is ultimately about the relationship between citizens and states and not having a fees regime in place encourages people to use freedom of information to find out more about services that they may wish to know about and there is no cap arising because only people with significant resources might be prepared to make a freedom of information request. It could be claimed that such a cap puts power into the hands of people with more economic advantages.

There have not been any enormous trends up or down in the use of the freedom of information process. Use has consistently been relatively high since the freedom of information process began in 2005. There are still issues with vexatious and persistent requests to some public bodies and there is still the matter of the press using freedom of information for "fishing" exercises. As there is no charges regime, the press can submit freedom of information requests to every local authority in the country to query an issue, hoping that something newsworthy will come from the information. That is part of the price to be paid for having a democracy.

Volume is significant and some people in Britain have raised concerns about the volume of freedom of information requests. The way to get around this is to publish more information proactively, and the more this is done in a useful and intelligent way, the less people will automatically need to approach freedom of information as the first means of acquiring information about how a public body operates. Councils and other institutions public much information about themselves proactively but often it is not very easily understood by people and can be difficult to access. The ease of access problem is one of the reasons freedom of information is well used, and as we move to a more intelligent approach to open data, I hope people's need to revert to freedom of information requests as a default will reduce. That may be idealistic.

There are two principal forms of exception under the Freedom of Information Act here. There are absolute exceptions for national security and there are also qualified exceptions. A public body must carry out a public interest test to establish whether information should be released when it could be covered by a qualified exception.

There has been much debate about that public interest test. There is no official definition provided for what public interest is, although the Information Commissioner has published a guidance on the public interest test and how it should operate. It sets out the basic principles that would constitute the public interest, which I believe still stand. In a guidance produced in 2007 the Information Commissioner listed a number of public interest factors, which included furthering the understanding of and participation in the public debate on issues of the day, promoting accountability and transparency, promoting accountability and transparency in spending and those types of general issues. That is what we talk about when we refer to the public interest. The public interest test should be interpreted quite broadly. Decision makers have to recognise that this is about public interest with a presumption that openness is better than non-disclosure, rather than public interest being the same as what is the interest of the organisation itself. The two do not necessarily coincide. How the public interest test operates has been one of the principal issues surrounding appeals to the Information Commissioner. I know there is a similar regime operating in Ireland's current and proposed freedom of information, FOI, system.

The fourth question was about using FOI from the inception and creation of new public bodies. That is an interesting point. It is not one that has been raised. We just make the assumption generally that when those bodies are established they will immediately be subject to freedom of information. It is part of the governing systems that one would expect a new public body to establish from the first day. One is establishing decision making systems, ways to deliver services on the ground, one is setting up the internal management processes and as part of that one sets up the FOI processes. As a case in point, from 1 April next there will be an entirely new structure for heart services operating in England. A new range of different health bodies will be established, with an odd one to be abolished. From 1 April those new bodies will be subject to FOI. I do not believe anybody has ever suggested or proposed that there be some type of lead-in. It is an interesting idea, but if one wants to have FOI and transparency as integral to the way that organisations make decisions, it is quite difficult to say that one must have all the other systems set up from the first day because they are business critical but FOI is a bit on the side or an extra thing which is not quite so important. It sends the wrong message.