Petition Delete "journalism, art or literature" exemptions from the FOI Act

Schedule 1, Part VI of the Freedom Of Information Act 2000 lists a number of organisations granted special exemption, where the Act only applies to information "held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature". This is misused to reject ANY FOI requests they'd rather not answer.

More details

They use a very loose interpretation of this exemption to support these rejections, as everything they do can be linked back to one of these three categories.

They make frequent use of the Act to interrogate other public sector organisations in their journalistic research, yet use the JAoL clause to shield themselves from similar investigation.

We therefore request that these exemptions be deleted from the FOI Act, leaving them open to the same level of scrutiny as other public bodies.

This petition is closed This petition ran for 6 months

210 signatures

Progress of the petition towards its next target: 210 of 10,000 signatures required to get a government response

Show on a map the geographical breakdown of signatures by constituency

10,000 signatures required to get a government response

Date closed 9 February 2017
Get petition data (json format)

About petition data

The data shows the number of people who have signed the petition by country as well as in the constituency of each Member of Parliament. This data is available for all petitions on the site. It is not a list of people who have signed the petition. The only name that is shared on the site is that of the petition creator.