So much for freedom of information

A few weeks ago I submitted a series of Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Heath.

They were mostly to do with Stoptober, the annual quit smoking campaign, and they included:

• The publication date for the Stoptober 2021 campaign evaluation.

• The full and final costs (including media costs) for Stoptober 2021.

• The total sum, including expenses, paid to Stoptober ‘celebrity ambassadors’ including [singer] Sinitta for their time spent promoting and/or developing content for the Stoptober 2021 campaign.

• The total sum, including expenses, paid to Stoptober ‘celebrity ambassadors’ including [professional dancer] James Jordan for their time spent promoting and/or developing content for the Stoptober 2022 campaign.

• The projected costs for Stoptober 2022 including the projected media spend.

Providing answers to those questions should have been pretty straightforward so on Friday I was surprised to receive the following email:

Dear Mr Clark,

Thank you for your correspondence.     

Due to the extremely high volumes of correspondence the department receives, we must regretfully inform you that we are not able to provide an individual response to every enquiry we receive from the public. We are, however, continuing to record all the correspondence we receive so that we can track the issues being raised. I am sorry if this falls short of the service you may expect to receive.   

Yours sincerely,     

Ministerial Correspondence and Public Enquiries     
Department of Health and Social Care     

To put this in perspective, when I have submitted similar FOIs concerning previous Stoptober campaigns I have always received answers to my questions.

For example, an FOI request submitted in 2020 revealed that the final cost of Stoptober 2018 was £2,038,000. In 2019 it was £1,717,000 while the projected cost of Stoptober 2020 was £1,748,000.

Bizarrely getting the same information for the 2021 and 2022 campaigns has been blocked ‘due to the extremely high volumes of correspondence the department receives’. How convenient!

Furthermore it’s now more than twelve months since Stoptober 2021 finished and there is not only no sign of the campaign evaluation report (evaluations are uploaded here) but the DHSC won’t even tell us when it’s due to be published.

Stoptober evaluations rarely tell us very much - which is why we’ve had to submit FOIs to dig out more information - but even the standard cursory report is better than nothing, and the very least the taxpayer deserves.

Meanwhile what are we to make of a government department that can’t answer the most basic queries?

Worse, the response came from a ‘no-reply’ email address so I can’t even respond directly to the civil servant who wrote to me.

Freedom of information? Yeah, right.

See also:
Welcome back to the Better Health Stoptober campaign (October 2022)

Comments

[Marcus J. Swift]

It would be interesting to submit an FOI to ask what percentage of FOI applications receive a substantive response across government departments, given we know that the civil service is understaffed at ground level. Rather than being an active avoidance, it may be a genuine lack of capacity, caused by the uncaring stance & self-made incompetence of our beleaguered government.