I thank the committee for the opportunity to provide evidence in its post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, or FOISA, as we tend to call it. I am grateful to the committee for looking at FOISA—not because it is broken, but because it could be better and because it is important to keep it alive and up to date in order to meet the challenges ahead. It is important to put the act in context and to highlight aspects of the current system that work well, which will allow us to focus on where improvements can be made.
Our starting point is that the freedom of information regime is generally working well. There are very high levels of public awareness—up to 91 per cent. When we delve deeper into knowledge of what the right means to people in real life, 71 per cent of people in Scotland understand that FOI gives them a right to ask for information from public bodies, compared with 54 per cent awareness throughout the United Kingdom as a whole.
Last year, more than 83,000 requests for information were made in Scotland, of which 75 per cent resulted in full or partial disclosure of information. Some three quarters of disclosures were full disclosures. Over the past three years, the rate of responses being made on time has been around 85 per cent consistently across authorities. That is obviously something that we want to improve on, but the rate is still relatively high, despite the increasing volume of requests.
Most of the time, when people exercise their right, they get the information that they were looking for first time and on time. Request activity, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, because freedom of information regime users can, and do, access information that has been proactively published in accordance with FOISA’s proactive publication duty.
Preliminary findings from the University of Dundee’s “Uncovering the Environment: The Use of Public Access to Environmental Information” project show what we expected to find: namely, that most people who look for information first go online and search for it themselves.
I hope that I will be able to say more about proactive publication later in the evidence session, but for present purposes my point is that we have a system that the public are aware of, that is regularly and increasingly used, that provides people with information to enable them to participate meaningfully in our processes, and which supports accountability of public bodies. It can also help authorities to improve their services and to work with the communities that they serve.
However, as I said at the start, there is room for improvement. I have previously set out in my written and oral evidence to the committee the ways in which I think the freedom of information regime could be strengthened. The committee has obviously had many other respondents who have provided input on that, both on paper and orally. I am delighted to see so much input.
Some of those inputs are of concern, not just for me, or nationally, but in the international context. If we look at how the system is viewed internationally, some of the proposed changes would have the effect of reducing the right to information. I am very lucky in that it has been suggested that Scotland might, for the first time, be given a right to information assessment—which would make us the first subnational regime to be put in that position. I hope to enter discussions on that.
As the committee will know from reading my submission, the top three opportunities are modernisation of the publication scheme duty, strengthening of the intervention powers, and provision of enforcement powers for breaches of the code. I look forward to dealing with those and any other matters that the committee would like me to deal with.