On Thursday 26 October 2006, Richard Thomas presented an FOI progress report to the Department for Constitutional Affairs. The report documents the contribution of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) over the 18 months since the Act came fully into force.
Richard said, 'It has been a challenging time, but we are proud of our achievements. We experienced problems over the first 12 months, which we have tackled with great vigour. We can now demonstrate clear and significant improvements in our complaints handling since the beginning of 2006. We are confident that we are moving in the right direction and that our performance will continue to improve.
This report explains the changes that we have made, and signals the performance that can be expected from us in the future with existing baseline funding or increased resources'
The report also includes the ICO’s new enforcement strategy which sets out how a tougher approach will be used with recalcitrant public bodies from now on. Many public authorities have learnt from handling freedom of information requests and have improved their systems for dealing with them. However, where public authorities are regularly or seriously failing to meet expected standards of good practice, the ICO will take appropriate action.