Understanding Nothing

The clear winner of the FoI speed race was the DEL who acknowledged the response the next day, asked for a postal address, and sent the information pretty much straight away! Some of the other departments still haven’t even acknowledged the response, and no-one else yet has sent the information. The speed of the DEL is even more striking as it turns out they weren’t even the primary originator of the contract I enquired about. It had been a LEDU contract which they had persuaded the DEL had agreed to pay half the costs of!

Of the ones who have responded, DCAL have been the least helpful so far, informing me approximately a week after their initial acknowledgement that the information I requested would cost too much to obtain. I’ve tried to narrow this down, but I’m not entirely convinced they properly understood the original request.

I’ll try to keep this table up to date as the departments respond.

The request date for all departments was 4th October, so 20 working days takes us to 1st November.

* The most unexpected response to date has been from the OFMDFM who, due to an email glitch, didn’t get my original request, but who contacted me in relation to discovering my request via this post! This was followed a few days later by a similar email from the DSD!

** These departments gathered the information, but there was so much that I agreed to go see it, rather than have them send it.

In June 2004 the Northern Ireland Audit Office published a report on the “Use of Consultants by Northern Ireland Government Departments”

This is a rather scary look at how the eventual costs of consultants are often significantly higher than that originally agreed, often by a factor of two or three. A while back, I made a Freedom of Information request to the NIAO to get further details on the almost 100 contracts examined as part of this report: who the consultants were, what the contract was, how much it was originally for, and how much was eventually paid.

This way I was able to discover, for example, that it was Cap Gemini Ernst and Young whose £30k for “Production of E-business strategy” eventually mushroomed to £183k.

But the real fun comes now when I request more details on each of these sampled contracts in turn. So this afternoon I took an hour and requested further information from each of 11 different Northern Ireland Government Departments. Most of them have forms on their website for making FOI requests, but I prefer to do this by email where possible so that I have better records of my requests. Actually finding an email address for doing this was rather tricky in many cases. Each department has a website that is arranged completely differently to others. Most have their main FOI link on their home page, but only a few actually list an email address there. Some have an explicit FOI contact on their ‘Contacts’ page instead. Others hide it in their Publication Scheme details. A few I wasn’t able to find at all, and had to just use a general email address.

It’ll be interested to measure the speed of responses compared to each other.

DETI, DRD, DCAL, DENI, DHSSPS, DSD, DOE, DEL, DARD, DFP and OFMDFM: the race is on.