Earlier in the year, David Hines released the findings of his remarkable OIA project on religious education in state primary schools. He sent requests to all 1800 state primary schools. What's appalling is that over 1000 of them were "reluctant" to answer and had to be persuaded to by the Ombudsman. In February, 260 were defying the Ombudsman's demand to respond to Hines' request. And now they've gotten away with it:
This Office received a complaint about the lack of a response by over 1,000 schools to a request for information (in the form of a religious education survey). We took an active role in supporting the Boards of Trustees to better understand their obligations under the OIA and, as a result, most subsequently provided the information requested. However, over 100 Boards of Trustees still failed to provide a response to the requester despite this being in breach of their obligations under the OIA.
The requester chose not to continue pursuing his complaint against the relatively few Boards of Trustees that remain in breach of their OIA obligations.
So, they ignored the law, and then they just waited it out until the requester got bored and decided to move on. If you need an example for why we need criminal penalties for breaches of the OIA, this is it. We can jail people for contempt of court; the Ombudsman should have similar penalties available for errant public officials.
I'm trying to get a list of the schools so they can at the least be named and shamed. These schools are failing both in their legal duty under the OIA, and also in their responsibilities as educational institutions to mould our future citizens. The message they're sending their students is crystal clear: the law does not matter. The sheer hypocrisy of that position (created by law, funded by law, and purporting to impose rules on others) should be plain to all.
And OTOH, is this really surprising? The Ombudsman is now so underfunded that it is reportedly taking six months for them to even give OIA complaints a number, and a complaint can take two years to resolve. Under these conditions, it is no wonder people give up waiting for justice - and no wonder agencies have started ignoring the law.
If we want the OIA to work, we need to properly fund enforcement. But Ministers have no interest in that, any more than Turkeys have an interest in christmas dinner. And so the OIA, a core part of our democracy, dies a slow death from neglect.
