With the FOI Act recently turning 20, the Manchester Evening News is looking back on the information revealed by the Act – both the national scoops and the paper’s own successes.
Meanwhile, FOI compliance is possibly not going much better down under.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has launched a new statistics dashboard (yes, it’s a terrible Power BI thing) to present its quarterly data on the number of and outcomes of FOI requests to Australian Government agencies and ministers.
Over there, they’re answering 74% in a timely manner. Which is about the same as the 75% answered in time by central Government bodies over here.
Baby deaths
The BBC obtained data from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust showing potentially preventable baby deaths through a Freedom of Information request.
This revealed at least 56 cases from January 2019 to July 2024, made up of 27 stillbirths and 29 neonatal deaths – which is a death within 28 days after birth.
In each case, a trust review group had identified care issues it considered may have made a difference to the outcome for babies.
Private prescriptions
Nearly 400,000 private prescriptions for ADHD medication were issued last year as patients sought to bypass lengthy NHS waiting lists, with people spending millions of pounds on treatment.
The number of prescriptions for drugs rose from 28,439 in 2018-19 to 397,552 in 2023-24.
Figures obtained by the BBC via a Freedom of Information request to the NHS Business Services Authority show that in 2023-24 a total of 14.7m tablets of controlled ADHD medication were prescribed privately to an estimated 30,000 patients.
Drink driving
An area of Wales has been revealed to be the UK’s second worst drink driving hotspot. Freedom of Information Act findings have highlighted the top ten locations where drivers get convicted for being caught over the drink-driving limit.
The 2023 data, released by the DVLA and requested by MailOnline, showed that Llandudno had the second highest conviction rate in the UK, just behind Northampton, which had the highest rate. Newport also featured on the list.
Number of drivers convicted per 10,000
- Northampton – 13.4
- Llandudno – 13.1
- Nottingham – 12.3
- Sunderland – 12.1
- Teesside – 11.7
- Wakefield – 11.7
- Durham – 11.5
- Motherwell – 11.5
- Newport – 11.3
- The Western Isles – 11.3
AI traffic cameras
AI-powered traffic cameras are to be used again in the Humberside Police area after a two-week trial last year detected 849 traffic offences.
Safer Roads Humber (SRH) deployed the cameras for a week in March and June. Software flags up possible offences and a person then reviews the footage.
According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the figures were obtained by car sales firm Cinch through a Freedom of Information request.
The 849 traffic offences were broken down into four categories. There were 533 instances of drivers not wearing a seat belt and two of children under 14 not wearing seat belts in the front passenger seat.
Drivers using mobile phones accounted for 301 offences and 13 drivers were observed not being in proper control of their vehicles.
Potholes…forever!
Meanwhile, if climate change leads to bad weather and more potholes and AI is a massive energy drain that potentially contributes to climate change, should we skip the AI finding more potholes so it doesn’t just contribute to more of them?
The UK’s pothole crisis has hit a five-year peak, with nearly one million reported in the last 12 months alone, as extreme weather events linked to climate change wreak havoc across the nation. According to new data obtained through a Freedom of Information request, councils have been notified of almost four million potholes since January 2020.
From January to November 2024, local authorities received close to one million (952,064) reports of potholes, averaging 3,122 daily reports.
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