FOI Friday: How the Local Democracy Reporter scheme is making the most of FOI

It’s just under a year since the contracts were awarded for the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the scheme funded by the BBC which is aiming to ensure more councils are covered in more depth. But it’s not just through council meeting reports that authorities are being scrutinised – the LDRS reporters are also making fine

FOI Friday: Brexit and the NHS, NHS secrecy, police secrecy and street-level data success

Brexit continues to be a happy hunting ground for information-hungry journalists … even if the story once again appears to be about the reluctance of those in power to actually talk about their planning for the biggest British government change in a generation. This week, GazetteLive in Teesside reported on the reliance local NHS services have on

FOI Friday: The power of FOI, pesky press officers, school place race and mouse droppings

The power of FOI confirmed in Essex You don’t have to look far to find critics of the Freedom of Information Act within journalistic circles. It’s not a replacement for investigative journalism, it’s too easy to ignore, it’s never going to uncover Watergate and so on. And, of course, if the point of FOI was

FOI Friday: Criminals applying to be taxi drivers, citizenship test failures and common names for crooks

Would be taxi drivers and their criminal convictions < Lincolnshire Live Sex offenders who have assaulted children in the past have applied to become taxi drivers in Lincolnshire, new data has revealed. Figures from the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) show that those who applied to become cabbies between 2012/13 and 2015/16 included people with

FOI Friday: 10 stories waiting to be uncovered near you

An increasingly infrequent look at stories being made possible thanks to FOI £120,000 of fines for parking in disabled bays < Shropshire Star Drivers have been fined more than £120,000 by Shropshire Council in the last three years for parking in disabled spaces without a blue badge. Falling numbers of retained firefighters < BBC The

FOI Friday: The stories made possible thanks to FOI in September 2016

A look at some of the stories made possible thanks to FOI laws in the UK – most of which can easily be replicated elsewhere… Ambulances called to one house 500 times < Kent Online Ambulance crews were called to 595 emergency calls from one private address in one year. The astonishing figure came to

FOI Friday: School holidays, council houses, non-paying councillors (again) and more

Asbesto in publicly-owned homes <Beyond the Pillars Blog Beyond the Pillars, which covers issues involving the North Ireland government, used FOI recently to find out how many homes owned by the NI Housing Executive – in other words, council homes – had asbestos in them. The answer: 70,000. 70,000! Three-fifths of publicly-owned homes, in other

FOI Friday: Councils happy to reveal councillors not paying tax, and readers asking the questions

Back again, a little later than planned, the latest look at how FOI is being used by the regional press to hold the great and sometimes good to account…

FOI FRIDAY: 10 FOI ideas for journalists is back!

Welcome to the return of FOI – a weekly look at FOI stories which are worth sharing (and in many cases, copying). As an added incentive to read on, this blog will also celebrate/shame those councils who prove that actions speak louder than words when it comes to delivering on the principles of FOI and

FOI Friday: The Tories who clearly love the Freedom of Information Act – and 9 other stories made possible by FOI this week

You don’t need Freedom of Information to expose a politician as a hypocrite. The Daily Mail proved that when it took a matter of hours to call out Chris Grayling after he attempted to ‘shame’ the media for using FOI to get stories! Grayling, it turns out, was a serial user of FOI when in