frsrdg · H104JO1 · 2013-11-13 00:00:00 — It must therefore have been clear relatively early that the request was of the kind that might need to be forwarded to the Government for its appraisal. Section 18 of the Instructions for the Government Offices stipulates that it is complex cases that can be transferred in this way, so it is not enough merely to state that this is what happened. A decision on how to respond to request could, in this light, have been made in much less time than the two months or so it seems to have required. One shortcoming in the way request was dealt with is that it is not clear which official in the organisation was responsible for it. It appears to be the Administrative Department that maintains the Government Offices telephone logs. According to the instructions for the Government Offices, therefore, it is there that the request should have been dealt with. It obviously spent nine days in the – which in itself is already a delay that is incompatible with the regulations – before it was transferred to the Administrative Department. When and why the request was later sent to the Prime Ministers Office has not been explained. The Prime Ministers Office then finally – at some date that is not precisely known – forwarded the request to the Government for its appraisal. These twists and turns illustrate the lack of clarity, not to say confusion, that is depicted above: it is obvious that this contributed to the unacceptably long time taken to deal with the request. 2 0 1 3 / 1 4 : J O 1 B I L A G A 1 0 3: second complaint second complaint concerned lists of transactions from the Government Offices accounts. This also involved potential documents that are subject to the principle of public access and avoidance of delay. After she had complained to the Parliamentary Ombudsmen, received the material she had requested – apart from information that had been declared confidential – about eleven weeks after submitting her request. Here the Government Offices have stated that the delay was because the list of transactions was extensive and therefore appraisal of their confidentiality status was time-consuming. With regard to the appraisal of confidentiality, the Government Offices added that the request concerned items of information that might in themselves be innocuous but could, taken as a whole, enable the routines in force to be mapped to provide insight into how central government functioned. Disclosure could therefore be assumed to jeopardise the security of the realm. I see no reason to question the Government Offices assessment of the need for appraisal of confidentiality status. The way in which this was undertaken seems, in the light of the current regulations on the provision of documents, both unstructured and rigid. The enquiry reveals that once the lists of transactions had been produced straight away by an official in the Administrative Department, they were circulated in a way destined to delay rather than hasten the process. To begin with they were sent to all the ministries, which in certain cases did not respond for several weeks. It was not until some time between and 16 that all the ministries had sent their responses to the Administrative Department, which in its turn forwarded the material to the Prime Ministers Office. There a new, overall, appraisal of confidentiality status was undertaken, which seems to have taken about another month, after which the material considered to be public was provided on 13 2012. It is as clear as daylight that this procedure was not characterised by an effort to respond to request for insight without delay. It appears to be unclear, just as it was in the case of request for the telephone logs, who was responsible for the shortcomings in the way this request was dealt with. The way in which the Government Offices dealt with the requests for official documents from and involved gross disregard of the provisions on the avoidance of delay in the Freedom of the Press Act. Judging from what has been disclosed and by the Government Offices own description, organisational shortcomings as well as unclear chains of responsibility and routines have contributed to the failure to comply with the constitutional provisions. Similar observations have been made in previous scrutinies. From the point of view of the Parliamentary Ombudsmen, it is unusual for obvious shortcomings in the way in which a public authority deals with issues relating to the principle of public access to come to light without the authority B I L A G A 10 20 13 /14 :J O1 acknowledging and deploring its failings. In the complaints reviewed here the Government Offices seem to think that the procedures were normal and acceptable. For this reason I would like to conclude by stressing that it is particularly important for the Governments own officials to respect the entitlement to insight that the public enjoy. Failure to do so could lead to the risk that other public authorities will consider that they are not required to comply punctiliously with constitutional provisions either, which in the long run would be a threat to the principle of public access. As has been made clear, it is incumbent upon the Government Offices and ultimately their senior officials, to ensure that there are effective procedures for issues relating to requests for documents and where decisions about them are to be made. The Parliamentary Ombudsmens supervision does not apply to the Government and the individual ministers, who are instead monitored by , to which a copy of this adjudication has been forwarded.