The most important amendment will involve the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which will be amended to allow the Health and Safety Commission and Executive to disclose information where there is a "clear public interest" to do so.
Another amendment, favoured by Ministers at both the Department of Heath and DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), would remove a ban on releasing information about clinical trials, imposed by the Medicines Act 1968, and replace it with the exemptions and public interest tests provided by the FOI Act.
The plans for this review of legislation are included in the Annual Report on the Implementation of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, published yesterday.
The FOI Act requires all public authorities to make information available proactively. It provides for Publication Schemes, which will give details of the classes of information that an authority makes available and how they are accessible.
Section 19 of the Act places a duty on every public authority to:
adopt and maintain a scheme which relates to the publication of information by the authority and to have that scheme approved by the Commissioner;
publish information in accordance with that scheme; and
review the scheme regularly.
Publication Schemes must specify:
the classes of information which the public authority publishes or intends to publish;
the way in which information of each class is, or is intended to be, published; and
whether the material is, or is intended to be, available free of charge or on payment.
Public authorities are required to consider public interest when:
allowing public access to information held by the authority; and
publishing reasons for decisions made by the authority.
Central government will launch departmental publication schemes from 1st December 2002, whilst all provisions of the FOI Act must be implemented by public authorities throughout the UK by 30 November 2005.
The Annual Report on the Implementation of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is available as a 68-page PDF from:
www.lcd.gov.uk/foi/imprep/annrep02.pdf
