UK FOIA requests - Spy Blog

It is now about halfway through the statutory response period of 20 working days for the first of our Freedom of Information Act requests.

Thanks to links from Need To Know, Cryptome and The Register, various search engines and blog aggregators etc., we have had tens of thousands of web visits to this blog, and hundreds from *.gsi.gov.uk UK Government Secure Intranet gateways, Central Government Departments, Quasi Autonomous Non Govermental Organisations (QUANGOs) and Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs) and also from Local Government domains.

However, as suspected, we have had, as yet, no contact or acknowledgement from any of the public bodies we have submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to, apart from a couple of immediate automatic autoresponder/out of office replies from a couple of the email addresses we sent copies of our requests to.

Why doesn't the Department for Constitutional Affairs run a public website front end to a centralised FOIA request tracking system (we cannot possibly cope with even listing the over 100,000 public bodies apparently covered by the legislation) ? This would help them monitor the effectiveness of their FOIA strategy, and would cut down duplicate requests for the same exempted information over and over again e.g. the legal advice for the war in Iraq etc.