Journalists last in the queue for MoD FOI responses

Thanks to FOI News for pointing out a report from an American academic which shows our Ministry of Defence is far from neutral when it responds to FOI requests.

Alasdair Roberts, from Suffolk University in Boston, looked at the data relating to 15,627 FOI requests made to the MoD.

He found that MPs and Peers had “Quick Response” stamped on 64% of their requests (the most of any category of requester) while bottom came journalists with a third getting a “Quick Response” stamp.

You can bet that those third came from the national media; your poor old freelancers and local reporters are unlikely to have been given preferential treatment.

FOI News says:

So much for the MoD being blind to who is making the request. ‘Quick Response’, who decides if a question gets that stamped on it? But I don’t want to attack the MoD as my experience is that of all the Government departments they are the fairest and most professional when it comes to FoI requests. Heaven knows what this study would have looked like if it had been using data from the National Offender Management Unit at the Ministry of Justice!

And I can second that comment about the National Offender Management Unit having spent two years trying to extract basic information from them. I currently have an appeal with the Information Commission about their abject failure to respond to requests in time.

You can read Prof Roberts report here.