FOI has been a long time in gestation. The FOI Act 2000 (for England and Wales) and the FOI (Scotland) Act 2002 (for Scotland) will be effective from 1 January 2005. Preparing for FOI – interpreting and implementing it – is the practical end, and, as Smith (Records Management Department of The National Archive at Kew) says, depends on reliable and effective records and archive management. Its emphasis on public authorities, from central and local government to the police and the health services, and its connection with other applicable UK law, has not made its passage, or acceptance, easy.
Concerns about keeping records of anything sensitive or confidential, and concerns about applying the public interest test to exempted classes of information, have added to managerial concerns about having resources to cope with the volume and type of anticipated requests. Some have argued that it makes government more transparent, while others express fears about discouraging officials from keeping anything sensitive. The same balance of interests, in fact, reflected in the earlier debate about data protection (DP), and implicit in any discussion about rights and denial of access to information.
It has been no accident that the Information Commissioner has combined FOI and DP functions, and his website (see www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk), along with others like www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ and www.nationalarchives.gov.uk, has been busy in recent years. FOI is wider, too, than it looks at first, taking in not merely the legislation and its implementation, but taking account also of changes (in fact and in the pipeline) in areas like environmental information (where the 1992 regulations are to be changed arising from the European Directive 2003/4/EC on public authorities and FOI), and of implications for customer service and business process.
In recent years there has been no shortage of information and advice about FOI. Works like Your Right to Know (Brooke, Pluto Press), The Information Audit (Higson and Nokes, Rivington Press), and a swathe of legal works, make the point. Other recent law‐related works in the information field, like Essential Law for Information Professionals (Pedley, Facet) devote sections to FOI, and Armstrong and Bebbington, in their Staying Legal (Facet), mention it in passing. Smith's approach is to explain the legal framework and to move on to the practical implications for records managers and (corporate) archivists. This is not, then, a book for lawyers but for information specialists, above all those at the sharp end. He draws on direct experience at The National Archives, and some of the content (especially that providing advice about training) derives from experience there.
The real strength of this book is that it feels as if “it has been there”. Smith gives us the law but he teases out what happens when you implement it – is it retrospective as well as current information, what about holding instead of owning, do you need third party consent, what if a document is unsuitable for copying, it is the information and NOT the document, how does FOI cross‐over with data protection and confidence law, what difficulties are likely to appear in applying the public interest test, if someone asks for the minutes of a meeting does that mean the whole document, what about documents that had been added to or revised or even destroyed? Questions, questions, in fact, that records managers have to deal with, and will have to deal with in new FOI ways, every working day.
This feature is one that makes the book useful for practitioners, even given the price and the fast‐moving legal scenario. Because FOI becomes effective on 1 January 2005, that does not make this book obsolete: the practical side of it will keep it useful for some time to come, enough to purchase it. Most public authorities, and readers, will already have publication schemes in place by now, probably on web sites. These contain schedules of classes of information which authorities will publish as a matter of course. Smith discusses these and provides some visual examples. He provides some flow charts to help decision‐making, a timetable of milestones, and examples of where practice kicks in. He deals quite well, too, with the codes of practice, some in place currently and likely to be superseded and/or subsumed in new law: an area to examine carefully. Codes are included in a liberal appendix.
Practitioners should also consider another dimension to this book which may – according to who they are and what they want – be a strength or a weakness. Smith rightly argues that effective implementation of FOI is predicated on efficient and effective records and archive management processes. By that token he includes a fair amount of material on records management as such (most of chapter six), picking up on access and authenticity, policy and procedures, record creation and training and evaluation.
The connection between these and the practical implementation of FOI, say on issues like disposal schedules and publication schemes, costs and charges and records audit, is clear, and needs to be discussed. Readers will find that useful. If, on the other hand, they have all this in place and want just how FOI impacts on their work, such discussion can be skimmed. The chapter on staffing and training, with its competency framework, is as much (or more) for the reader wanting generic stuff on records management and/or staff training than for one wanting specific FOI advice.
This is not a fault or a criticism: it is simply what the book is and does.
It is, then, what it says it is – a practical guide to implementing the FOI Act, providing good clear background and interpretive advice on the law itself, and identifying the many implications for practitioners. It needs to demonstrate a connection between law and practice, and takes us into each: some readers will want more law, some more practice, and probably most will find it comes back round on itself a bit too often. But for all that it is a very useful book, capturing the moment, likely to be useful well up to 2006 or so, and, if you have money to spare for the professional collection or the desk, buy it.
