Making sure that FOI’s Section 12 ‘processing time budget’ is well spent is important, but nothing is more important than making sure you don’t go a second over! If you do, you lose it all. The law doesn’t say ‘spend 18 hours working on each request’ it says ‘if we estimate a request will take over 18 hours, throw it straight in the bin’.
The ‘cost limit’ is really expressed in time: 24 hours of officer time for central-government, but 18 hours for everything else. That racks up fast if multiple officers have to conduct searches for information.
Asking for emails 'about' something is easy to refuse because … linguistically? the only way you can really answer that request for information is to gather up a big pile of likely looking emails.… but then how do you know what they are ‘about’? Well someone will have to sit down and read them all... It’ll take forever. 318 hours, or so BCC say!
That estimate is bollocks, but even if your request would only take a tenth of that time to process, it’s still way over 18 hours so that doesn’t even help. The problem is that the way the request is worded demands a laborious searching process (or at least it can be misinterpreted as demanding it).
The root problem is that an officer has to read all that email before they can give it to you, but you can word your request so they don’t have to.
We can take advantage of the fact that, tucked away in secondary legislation, is a list of just four limited tasks you're allowed to include when calculating the 18 hour processing-time estimate:
It's the 'extracting' where requests for correspondence on a certain topic come apart. It takes so long to sort out the relevant emails from the irrelevant pile of other correspondence that it’s never going to work.
So just request the whole goddamn pile. You can do the sifting and the sorting on your end, and the council doesn’t have to worry about it.
It's counterintuitive! But a request for a dozen (out of hundreds of thousands) of Marvin’s emails ‘about’ something would take too long to process, but a request for an export of his entire inbox would be super-simple.
So my point about trying to write a request like a digital search is really all about eliminating that 'extraction time'.
The strategy is to request a gigantic bundle of emails using the same kind of parameters you would plug into your Gmail search - and that is the end of your request. The authority doesn't even need to open the messages, it just needs to export the whole lot and mail you a ZIP folder. They’ll have an email-archive program which is basically built to search and export mail.
BCC reckon it'll take 318 hours to gather and read all those emails? This method gets you them in 15 minutes! No reading to see what they are about is necessary!
Of course, BCC will still have to read all that mail, to see what it is all about. And they will huff and puff about not wanting to do it.
But… bad luck for them. I don’t see ‘Redaction’ anywhere on the list of things you can include in the 18 hour cost limit. All they can include in that limit is: determining, locating, retrieving and extracting.
What you’ve asked for is a few simple email search commands for your ‘retrieval’ and the ‘extraction’ is just clicking export. So if they want to go reading through all that email that’s their problem, they can do it on their own time.
That’s roughly how I’d attack a Section 12 refusal. Word your request to avoid as much processing as possible!
Theoretically, this means it’s possible to request the entire BCC email server within your 18 hours time/cost budget. A well worded request could negate the cost-limit entirely.
Sadly, there is still an upper limit to what you can request though. The limit is when you request so much information that it cannot have any serious purpose. It’s just a fishing expedition, and the net has been cast so absurdly wide that it’s not reasonable.
So the limit of the size and scope of a request is bigger than 18 hours might suggest but it can’t be so large to be ‘Vexatious’ under Section 14 of the Freedom of Information Act or ‘Manifestly Unreasonable’ under Section 12(4)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations.