Well, there is no getting round the fact that more FoI requests and SAR's
has more costs. If I go down to the police station and make a complaint that
also has a cost.
The more one encourages people to take up a "right" which noone denies is in
itself a good will create extra costs in the macro.
Of course, with FoI, the Government wasn't able to differentiate between the
individual rights of the man in the street and those of corporations - and
that is why the legislation assumes that the requester is an individual.
With FoI there can be a reduction in individual requests by the publication
of information eg on the Internet.
With the DPA there is no such trade-off - other than the reduction in the
amount of data collected about us - which is obviously unlikely.
Nick Landau
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Bowden" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: [data-protection] Best practice handling of SARs
> On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 02:19:49PM +0100, Antoinette Carter wrote:
>> Less waste = less cost = better society.
>> Now there's a Friday afternoon belter if ever I saw one!
>
> I wouldn't agree that making an SAR, or dealing with one, is "waste". That
> seems to be an axiom of your argument though, so I doubt we're going to
> be able to find much agreement on the follow-ons!
>
> I don't think I agree either that "less cost = better society". I'm
> certainly all for smaller government, but I'm not sure I'm ready to get
> rid of it completely! :)
>
> I agree that less waste = better society, but eliminating costs randomly
> wouldn't really be a good thing. You need to reduce the correct costs,
> and I don't think that DP and/or FOI costs are the right ones to
> minimise, per se.
>
> My equation looks more like:
> More transparency = more openness = better society
>
>> I can understand why you might not mind wasting some of Tesco's huge
>> corporate profit
>
> In Tesco's case I wouldn't be surprised if they'd gotten it down to not
> even running at a loss at all. They've probably got the human time down
> to a minimum, but I guess the volume of information they store means
> the paper, printing & postage bill would probably eat up most of the
> tenner! (I'm not sure if the "it costs more than 10 pounds to handle a
> 10 pound cheque would apply here either as presumably Tesco handle many
> thousands of cheques a day anyway).
>
>> but bombard your local council with unnecessary DSARs
>> and your council tax will go up; as will your neighbours'. Is that
>> really a good thing?
>
> I've never actually made an SAR from my council (perhaps I should -
> might be interesting!), just lots of FOI requests, and I believe that
> the long term effects of open government outweigh any short-term costs
> that may be incurred whilst trying to get there...
>
> Tony
>
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