Salford's botched handling of FoI

So just how desperate were the University of Salford to avoid having to deal with Freedom of Information requests submitted regarding their expense accounts and managerial activities? A subject access request to the Office of the Information Commissioner eventually resulted in a response amounting to several hundred pages of documentation being handed over, including correspondence between the University and the investigating Case Officer, Mr Steve Dickinson.


So what has this vast bulge of documentation revealed? Well, in no particular order:

• The University wrote to Mr Dickinson no less than three times pleading for a face-to-face meeting rather than engaging in correspondence. Why exactly they request this is unclear. What is clear is that the University promise to cover Mr Dickinson's travel expenses and submitted the following, rather perplexing, line: "I am certain that we can demonstrate to your satisfaction that disruption was a primary objective of this campaign."
• In spite of Mr Dickinson pointing out to the University that a face-to-face meeting would be "somewhat unusual", this meeting appears to have gone ahead. Mr Dickinson appears to have met up with Matthew 'Accident' Stephenson and Alison Purnell (Martin Hall's Chief of Staff - a very regal sounding job title). There is no indication of where or when this meeting took place, why it was necessary or what documentation or information was exchanged. A request has been submitted asking for further clarification.
• About 80% of the submissions made by the University are in fact totally irrelevant waffle. There are pages and pages of articles from the Times Higher Education, Manchester Evening News, Private Eye, Salford Star etc. There are even paper copies of comments on the news stories by individuals the University has deemed 'undesirables', including hand-written notes in some instances of what became of the transgressors.
• There was also a great show made of critical comments left on Professor Martin Hall's increasingly bizarre blog (which this week seems to implicitly attack the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). Vast swathes of the endless documentation were in fact copies of his blog and comments deemed 'undesirable'.
• The University have sought plenty of legal advice regarding their position - a sure fire indication of how much they wanted to avoid processing many requests for information.
• There are also pages and pages of waffle in which the number of requests submitted to the University are analysed numerically and in graphical representations (this being a supposed 'justification' for not dealing with any of them).
•  Election campaign materials of several individuals - including those that have not submitted any Freedom of Information Requests (to our knowledge) - were incorporated into the 'evidence' and the University attempted to argue that these were relevant in terms of there being a campaign to disrupt the workings of the University.
• Unsurprisingly, both the initial decision to treat requests as vexatious and the decision to re-affirm this at Internal Review were taken by the same individual within the University - our old friend, Dr Adrian Graves.
• More worryingly, Dr Graves submitted on 22nd September a letter to Steve Dickinson in which he actually defames several of the requestors in order to try and justify the claim of Vexatiousness. This includes a 'chronology' of events leading up to the requests (much of which is, in fact, a complete fabrication), as well as accusing two of the requestors of criminal offences (another fabrication). Needless to say, he offers absolutely no evidence for the assertions, and we are currently investigating whether written submissions to the Information Commissioner's Office meet with Absolute or Qualified Privilege. [Edit] - turns out it meets with Qualified Privilege (i.e. can be defeated by demonstration of malice), so bon appetit!

So there you have it. Face-to-face meetings of questionable necessity, defamation, legal advice, hundreds of pages of 'evidence' submitted.

Oh and by the way, none of it worked!