Chapters: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | annex A
2.1 There are three main features of the FOI Act:
2.2 This guidance focuses on the interpretation of the boundaries of the new statutory rights of access, which are put in place by Part II of the Act.
2.3 The FOI Act applies, with few exceptions, to all public authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Act also applies in Scotland, but not to the Scottish Parliament or Executive, or to those authorities for which the Scottish Parliament has competence to legislate. There is separate Scottish legislation covering those bodies and it comes into force on the same date as the FOI Act. [footnote 2]
2.4 The Act does not apply to information held by the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Special Forces or any unit of the Armed Forces providing assistance to GCHQ; they are not public authorities for the purposes of the Act. However other access regimes including the Data Protection Act and the Environmental Information Regulations (made under section 74 of this Act) do apply to these organisations.
2.5 Section 81 provides for each government department to be treated as a separate public authority for the purposes of the Act.
2.6 The Act applies to all of the information held by public authorities, recorded in any form[footnote 3]. This is a wide definition that includes paper-based documentation, information stored on computer, audio and video recordings, plans, maps and photographs. It does not apply to unrecorded information which may be known to an authority or to information which an authority has held in the past but which has been destroyed in recorded form before a request for it is received.
2.7 The right under section 1 of the Act is to obtain access to the information itself and not to the document or record which contains it. This means, for example, that where a document contains a mixture of disclosable and non-disclosable information, the disclosable information must be extracted from the document and released without the document itself being released. Even where all of the information in a document is disclosable it is not necessary to answer a request by making a copy of the document (although that may often be convenient).
2.8 The right to information created by the Freedom of Information Act permits anyone, anywhere, to make a request. The Act does not distinguish between members of the public, journalists, companies or other organisations. Nor does it distinguish on grounds of nationality or country of residence. Applicants do not have to be UK citizens, or living in the UK, to make a request.
2.9 No personal or private interest in the information needs to be shown or proved in order to make a request and applicants do not need to give reasons for their request. Nor do they have to make reference to the Act in their application.
2.10 That means that (subject to the special cases referred to in this guidance) a public authority in receipt of a request for information is not entitled to know the reasons for a request or to impose conditions on disclosure or on the use which may be made of information following disclosure. This is an important part of the context in which decisions on disclosure fall to be made; it means that in principle the same information should be provided to any person who makes the same request, and that when information has been disclosed it must be assumed to be available in the public domain.