No-one is safe from the Freedom of Information Act, not even the BBC.
Big brother is cracking the whip and Aunty will have to comply. The Information Commissioner's Office - which, one would hope, should have more important things to do - has ordered the BBC to disclose the annual staff costs for EastEnders.
Perhaps the information commissioner genuinely believes the Beeb's expenditure is the most worrying thing for Britons, and the exercise is not, for example, a naked attempt to divert attention to a household-name soap opera after months of disastrous press for government IT. The loss of the personal data of 25 million citizens by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, and so on.
At least we can all rest assured that our tax pounds are working for us and the legislation is giving us access to what we really need to know: what the BBC is paying its soap stars. But if the BBC is being forced to show and tell, it is a little worrying as to what lengths the ICO will go in the name of freedom. 
Comments (1)
Does the person who wrote this article know anything about the Freedom of Information Act? Or about the function of the ICO? The ICO is the statutory regulator for the FoI Act. They cannot simply shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, doesn't seem too important, this one - let's just leave it." Imagine if every public body simply picked which bits of the work it was legally obliged to perform it actually bothered to do on the basis of its own opinion of whether it seemed interesting or important.
FoI requests are made by individuals. The whole point of the Act is that public decision making and expenditure is transparent. It is surely at least arguable that the proportion of their budget the BBC spend on the staff of one of their programmes is of significant public interest. The papers seemed to think the salaries of stars such as Jonathan Ross were worth reporting when they were revealed. Why not these?
Finally, is the author seriously suggesting that this request has been made by someone in the government in a desperate and thoroughly bizarre attempt to distract from its own problems? This would be a conspiracy theory of singular eccentricity.
More plausible, of course, that the author simply has no idea what FoI is, what it is for, or how it works.
Posted by Anonymous | October 13, 2008 3:36 PM
Posted on October 13, 2008 15:36