Hi Lawrence,
"What this suggests, then, is that there is something about the FOIA process that encourages people to "cost" it in a way that is not seen in DPA SARs even though SARs have been around longer."
My feeling here is that you may be looking at this the wrong way round. Sure, SAR's have been around for longer but there's nothing (that I'm aware of at least) that would have prevented a government in changing the rules to allow for charging. So the fact that they haven't suggests to me that there is a quality of a SAR that precludes charging rather than something about FOIA that doesn't.
That quality IMO is the 'subject', the individual themself. How often do we hear "It's my information, I should have it?!" when patiently explaining why some information has been redacted? Now, imagine the uproar if we started to say 'I'm sorry you can't have any of your material because it'll take us more than 2.5, 5, 10 etc days to locate and redact it?
If for one wouldn't feel comfortable about telling, for example, a care leaver that the cost for them to obtain the history of their early life would run into several hundreds of pounds (which it would often be).
People are passionate about their information exactly because it is their information. I don't think any government would be willing to suffer that particular backlash when they can quite happily let the local authorities absorb the cost.
Andrew
Andrew Goodfellow
Senior Information Governance Officer
Nottingham City Council
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