FOI Man looks at what FOI performance statistics tell us about the attitudes to openness of the rival Mayoral candidates in London
Even if you’re not a Londoner (and I wasn’t always), and possibly even if you don’t live in the UK, you are probably aware of the colourful personalities that have inhabited the ‘glass testicle’ (or motorbike helmet if you’re of a more gentle disposition) as London’s Mayor.
For 8 years, City Hall was the domain of Ken Livingstone, who before its abolition in 1986, had been the Leader of the previous pan-London authority, the Greater London Council (GLC). He claimed credit for increases in police numbers in the capital, improvements to the transport infrastructure, and winning the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games for London.
Many were surprised when a combination of voter fatigue, corruption allegations and a backlash from the outer borough residents saw him fall to the eccentric but charismatic figure of Boris Johnson in 2008. Boris claims to have cut staff numbers across the GLA Group, is proud of the city-wide ‘Boris-Bikes’ scheme that has been introduced by his administration, and has used London as the guinea pig for many of the ideas that the Coalition Government has begun to roll out nationally in the last year. In particular, he claimed to be bringing in a new transparency to City Hall.
So is Boris really more transparent than Ken? Some of his initiatives are undoubtedly a move in the right direction. Two years before Eric Pickles took on local authorities and insisted that they published all expenditure over £500, the GLA was publishing its expenditure over £1,000 (radical at the time). You can now access that data, together with much else, in the pioneering London Datastore.
It’s probably a little unfair though to compare this with Ken’s record. Nobody published datasets until very recently, and there was little pressure to publish all expenditure until Boris’s campaign team came up with it. So points to Boris for keeping up with (and slightly ahead of ) the Jones’s on pro-active disclosure. But the GLA (especially City Hall) was always rather good at pro-active disclosure on its website – it’s just the methods that have changed.
A fairer fight can be based on FOI statistics. Who is quicker at answering requests? How ready are they to use an exemption? Courtesy of a WhatDoTheyKnow requester, the figures for 2007 to 2010, and the GLA’s internal request log, can now be found online (links below so you can do your own analysis).
A caveat. I’m not a statistician, so don’t expect too much from this analysis – it’s just my impression gained from playing around with the numbers. But what do I think the figures tell us?
Well, London’s journalists regularly complain about the speed of response to FOI requests from the GLA. So has that got worse or better since Boris’s election in May 2008?
First thing to say is that the GLA Group consists of five main bodies. There is the Greater London Authority (GLA) at the centre, which supports the Mayor and the London Assembly on a day to day basis. Then there is Transport for London (TfL), the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA – which oversees the Metropolitan Police Service, what we know as ‘The Met’), the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) and finally the London Development Agency (LDA – which used to be known as ‘the Mayor’s piggy bank’ and is being abolished as we speak as part of the Government cuts).
Across the Group (excluding TfL), it may surprise you to hear that there has been little change over the last four years in the speed of responses. Approximately 14% of requests are answered later than 20 working days. And that was the same in Ken’s last full year (2007). It also should be borne in mind that this performance has been maintained in the face of rising volumes of requests, and job cuts. In 2007, the whole group received 1,662 requests. By 2010 that had risen to 2,807.
One glaring exception stands out. It is no surprise that TfL were investigated by the Information Commissioner for their performance. In 2007, only 17% of requests were answered late (still a significant figure). In Boris’s first full year of 2009, 35% of requests to TfL were answered late. The situation is clearly improving from more recent figures, but it remains a mystery as to why there was such a sharp rise in the rate of late responses following Boris’s election.
So what about use of exemptions? Well, again, proportionally, not much has changed across the group as a whole. The exception, this time, is the GLA itself at City Hall. In 2007, exemptions were only used in 6% of cases. This has risen in every year since and in 2010 15% of requests were fully or partially refused. The GLA’s detailed log indicates which exemptions were used, and this suggests a rise in the use of exemptions for commercial and policy information. To be fair, the biggest rise has been in the use of the section 40 personal information exemption, which could well just be the entirely reasonable redaction of private individuals’ names and contact details.
So, on balance, there’s not much between Boris and Ken on FOI and openness. And that’s not to be sniffed at in the light of rising volumes of requests and cuts to staff answering them. But the figures do perhaps suggest some worrying trends, in punctuality and use of exemptions, in the first half of Boris’s first term of office.
Here are the links to the WhatDoTheyKnow data – see what you can make of it.
LDA FOI statistics (watch out for their exemption stats – I think they’ve provided total numbers of exemptions used as opposed to numbers of requests where exemptions were used, which is a subtle, but important, difference)