Ministry of Defence: Freedom of Information
(asked on 7th March 2016) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what estimate his Department has made of the number of freedom of information requests (a) granted and (b) refused by his Department in each of the last five years; and what the total cost of processing these applications was in each such year.
The Government publishes statistics on the operation of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2000 within central Government, including details on numbers of requests received. These can be found at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics.
For ease of reference, a summary is provided in the below:
Year | Total resolvable requests | Outcome of FOI request | |||
Granted in Full | Partially Withheld | Fully Withheld | Response Not Yet Provided | ||
2010 | 2,568 | 1,628 | 170 | 300 | 470 |
2011 | 2,844 | 1,822 | 256 | 648 | 118 |
2012 | 2,667 | 1,723 | 244 | 636 | 64 |
2013 | 2,825 | 1,822 | 272 | 657 | 74 |
2014 | 2,628 | 1,475 | 323 | 724 | 106 |
All staff within the Ministry of Defence are responsible for ensuring that the Department as a whole is able to meet its legislative obligations under the FOI Act, and many can be involved in processing FOI requests. The costs in terms of staff time spent on this activity are not recorded and so the total cost cannot be calculated.