Freedom of information requests are a pretty cool feature of law that forces public bodies to disclose information on request if it is appropriate to do so. However it effectively only applies to public bodies which effectively excludes most charities and private companies.
Why?
The purpose of the FOI law is to catch out public bodies that are up to some sort of shenanigans – spending public money on first class junkets to Hawaii (or Italy if you’re on the American continent), diverting funds intended for hospital beds to some less worthy purpose, losing nuclear submarines, and all sorts of other nefarious activities that idiots with inadequate supervision can get up to.
This is all very well … indeed very useful, because the public should be able to obtain details from public bodies about what they get up to.
But what about other organisations?
In theory, private companies are supervised by the board, which in turn is supervised by the shareholders. In practice, shareholders are unlikely to be interested in the day to day operation of a company until that company starts losing money. So what happens when a company is up to something nasty, but is still making profits? Well there is always the hope that hard investigative journalism will expose the scandal.
Or you could change the law and make freedom of information requests apply to all organisations.
Because journalists can use FOI requests to delve into the secrets of public organisations to get an easy story, we are in danger of getting a skewed picture of the relative merits of public organisations versus private organisations. If scandals within the public sector are easy to expose, and scandals within the private sector are hard to expose, we will get more stories about scandals in the public sector.
Which may lead the naïve to believe that the public sector is more prone to nefarious behaviour than the private sector.
So in a way FOI requests applying to only the public sector is another way of demonising the public sector.
But ultimately the question is: do charities and private companies sometimes get up to activities that it is in the public interest to know? If the answer is yes, then of course FOI requests should apply to them.
