Freedom of Information and Disability: Briefing Notes

A Scottish Disability Team Guidance Note on The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and the rights of Disabled People, published February 2005.

This article is available to read online or for download:

Legal Note

These Scottish Disability Team Guidance Notes are intended to provide general advice only, and are not an authoritative treatment of the law. Professional advice should be sought before acting on any of the material contained in these Guidance Notes as it may not be appropriate to your circumstances. These Guidance Notes are intended to relate primarily to the law as it applies to Scotland, however colleagues from other countries and elsewhere in the UK may find it useful to refer to the information contained herein.

Acknowledgements

The Scottish Disability Team would like to thank Gavin Simpson [gsimpson@dendrite.fsnet.co.uk] who devised and wrote this document and also Lesley Paterson, Thorntons WS Solicitors, for her legal input [lpaterson@thorntonsws.co.uk].

A note on Language: In these Guidance Notes we use the language of "impairment" and "disability" as defined by the social model of disability. It is also the preferred language of the disabled people's movement. Whilst people have impairments, e.g. deafness, blindness muscular dystrophy etc, disability is the outcome of the interaction between a person with an impairment and the environmental and attitudinal barriers s/he may face. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), however, uses the term "disability" to mean what the social model defines as "impairment", so it occurs in this way in these Guidance Notes when direct quotations from either the DDA or its associated Codes of Practice are used.

 

Contents

1: Introduction

These briefing notes assume that the reader has a good level of knowledge of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 ("FoI"), the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 ("DDA") and the Data Protection Act 1998 ("DPA") and are primarily aimed at staff who have responsibility for FoI compliance in colleges and universities. More detailed information regarding the obligations of universities and colleges under the FoI is available from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC Briefing Paper on the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.

The intention of the FoI is to give members of the public the right to be informed about the internal workings of public authorities and the right to access information held by them. Under the FoI, all public authorities (which include universities and colleges) require to adopt a publication scheme under which certain types of information will be systematically published and to deal with specific requests made from members of the public for information not included in the publication scheme. The obligations under the FoI have been brought into force in stages, with the date of final implementation being 1 January, 2005.

The FoI does to some extent parallel the Data Protection Act 1998 ("DPA") which gives the data subject the right of access to personal data held about him or her (a right which includes, but is not limited to, information held by public authorities). The main difference between the DPA and the FoI is that a request for information can be used to elicit information about matters which are not personal to the inquirer.

Disabled people can already use the DPA as a means of gaining access to their personal data and as a result of the FoI, disabled people will also now have access to a much wider range of information. The aim of these briefing notes is to provide a summary of what the new obligations under the FoI mean for disabled people and universities/colleges and to outline what systems universities and colleges might put in place to deal with requests from disabled people under the FoI.

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Next page - 2: Providing information in a specific form.