What counts as easily available?

About a month ago I wrote on a government database aimed at naming and shaming those companies which refused to pay out industrial tribunal claims.

Unfortunately you had to know the name of either party involved to carry out a search and each seach costs you £8 and if you wanted bulk access (as credit reference agencies do) you would have to pay even more and there were restrictions on how the data could be used and, and, and.... basically this was a useless effort at naming and shaming.

So I put a Freedom of Information request in to the Ministry if Justice asking for a copy of the database.

Today I got a response (over the 20 working day limit but we'll let that pass).

My request was refused under section 21 which says that you don't have to give out the info if it is already easily accessible. Interestingly, Section 21 doesn't have a public interest defence.

I've asked for a review of their refusal arguing that the information isn't freely accessible.

There were, at the last count, 161 companies on the database. With a fee of £8 a search it would cost me £1,288 to discover all their details. This is more than the MoJ could reasonably be asked to spend complying with a FOI request.

The Information Commissioner has already ruled that, while charging for access does not in itself mean information is inaccessible, excessive fees do constitute a barrier. See this ruling which has gone to appeal and in particular paragraph 35 (thank you FOI News for this).

I would argue that exactly the same situation applies here where it would cost me an excessive amount to obtain the information requested and more than guidelines say the MoJ should spend complying with FOI requests.

Further, the database can only be search once you have a name of either party involved. Therefore access is only open to those with prior information and obtaining that would likely require extra cost. The average user cannot freely access this database, even if it was free, because they would have no information to input to start the search.

The database itself is so constructed to be inaccessible unless you can pay a large sum of money and have a name as a starting point. This set up and the refusal to release the information, I would suggest, frustrates a primary reason for why the database was established in the first place.

Well, we'll see how my appeal fares, but it is annoying at a very basic level that government data, collected and maintained on our behalf, isn't made more easily available. Anyhow I thought that justice must not only be done, but seen to be done.

It would take five minutes to copy that database and send me a spreadsheet and that would sort it out. Or am I being naive?