The Guardian

By David Leigh and Rob Evans

26 October 2006

Already endangered freedom of information laws will be further threatened unless ministers provide more money, the watchdog who polices the act said yesterday. Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, warned that he needed more government funding to reduce the huge backlog of unresolved cases.

The commissioner has been struggling to adjudicate the number of appeals from the public against government bodies that have refused to release information.

His warning comes a week after Lord Falconer, the constitutional affairs secretary, proposed measures that would choke off access to information and allow Whitehall to reject more requests on grounds of their being "too expensive to answer".

MPs and campaigning groups accuse ministers of seeking to throttle the act to curb the release of politically sensitive and controversial documents.

Mr Thomas said the act was a success; about 120,000 requests a year were submitted to public bodies. "A great deal of information has been released since the introduction of the act, which would not otherwise have been in the public domain," he said. He cited cases where he had already ordered reluctant public bodies to disclose information: this included the dates of calls between the prime minister and the press magnate Rupert Murdoch, MPs' travel expenses, and a report on legionnaires' disease at a hotel.

Under the act, any person can appeal to the information commissioner if they believe a public body has unjustly kept secret information they seek. More than 4,400 appeals have been sent to him.

However, the act has been blighted by the failure of the information commissioner's office to deal with these appeals, leading some people to claim their cases disappeared down a black hole. There is a backlog at present of 1,245 cases.

Yesterday, Mr Thomas admitted the delays were "unacceptable" but claimed his organisation had "turned a corner". A grant of £850,000 from the constitutional affairs department this year had helped reduce the pile of complaints. He had also re-organised his department, which cost about £5m a year to run. Now an average of 245 cases a month were being closed, compared with 140 last year.

But Mr Thomas, who said he was worried the backlog might mount again, is pleading for an extra £750,000 in government cash for the next financial year. The volume of new complaints was nearly 20% above projected levels. The money would help him decide 90% of cases within nine months. He also told the Guardian he now wants to start cracking down on officials who were dragging their feet.