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Annual Report 2008 - Text
Applications to my Office for Review
Where a requester is not satisfied with the decision of the public body on his/her FOI request, he/she may apply to my Office for a review of that decision. In most circumstances, this review will constitute the third analysis and decision in that case. The decision which follows my review is legally binding and can be appealed to the High Court, but only on a point of law.
The number of applications for review made to my Office during 2008 was 304, a decrease of 49 cases, or 14%, on 2007. As presented in Chapter 4 (Table 13), 228 of these applications were accepted for review during 2008 which compares to 248 accepted in 2007. This fall-off is in line with the overall reduction in the number of requests apparent since 2003, so it will be interesting to see if the increase in the number of requests received by public bodies in 2008 feeds into applications received in my Office in 2009.
In my Annual Report for 2007, I commented on the large reduction in the proportion of applications to my Office relating to personal information, and stated my intention to keep this under review to see whether that decrease turned out to be a once-off occurrence. While the relevant figure of 31% for 2008 is an increase over the low of 24% in 2007, it is still lower than the rate of 40% or more that had been received in my Office in previous years.
The proportion of cases appealed to my Office, and accepted for review, as a percentage of the total number of requests received by public bodies was 1.8% compared to 2.3% in 2007 and 2.2% in 2006. A breakdown of the public bodies concerned and the subject matter of review applications accepted are contained in Chapter 4 (Tables 15 and 17). The number of third party objections to the release of information, at 5.3%, compares to 8.1% in 2007 and 2.8% in 2006. This figure has fluctuated quite a lot over the years, but as the absolute number of cases is relatively small (12, 20, and 7 in 2008, 2007 and 2006, respectively) a relatively small change in the number of cases can cause a significant change in the percentage figure.
