There is no such thing as an irrelevant request. Every piece of information is useful and can be used in some way shape or form. Some FoI requests are interesting and do really make you think (Like this one, and the others that the lady made. I would love to know what this is leading to and maybe make some more FoI requests relating to it, but let's see what pops up first). Then again, you get ones like this. Now I am all for prepping (As my blog on civil contingencies testifies), but what is the point of this?
That being said I did do this. As the old saying goes, when you point a finger, three get pointed back. Who am I to case the first stone? So I thought about this and decided to have a little look and see what else people have decided to to. So www.whatdotheyknow.com has a search and I decided to have a little look for the word:
Well, you can look the results up yourself. A pretty good smorgasbord of responses which make me proud to be British. One response I loved was :
“The Upper Tribunal has previously concluded that ‘vexatious’ could be defined as the ‘manifestly unjustified, inappropriate or improper use of a formal procedure, therefore I consider your request to be an inappropriate use of the right of access to information afforded by the Act.
My decision is based on the fact that the subject matter of your request is inane or extremely trivial and the request appears to lack any serious purpose and is solely made for the purpose of amusement.”
Warms the cockles of your heart, doesn't it? As Morpheus said to Neo in the Matrix, “how far down does this hold go?”. So a good look down the pile found this. Swindon Borough asking for Paranormal investigators? Is this true? Well to be honest, I would query that one to (My belief in the paranormal is not something to be discussed in this blog, so please do not ask).
Why would they need one and why would they want to get them involved? I know that Newport city council was asked (via FoI), if they were haunted, but still. So why has my interest in this peaked? It shows WHY FoI is a good communication tool for people between their government and the general public.
You see if you investigate this case a little more you can see that Swindon actually stated that they had NOT given ANY funding to the paranormal group. It seems that there was a slight error from the group. You see one of the comments made on the request was:
“PSI and SBC collaborated on the Haunted Swindon Project - by allowing access to vary sites and resources - commencing in 2006. This project aimed to educate through the medium of preservation of culture, and also contributed towards PSI's wider research aims”
Doesn't that show straight away that the Chinese Whispers have ended. A little bit of Dialogue between Government and Citizen. So not that Irrelevant at all, was it?
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