OIC: "I have no reason to dispute the Department's assertion in this regard"

clohamon

If you're thinking of taking an FOI request all the way to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) that's a phrase you're going to become very familiar with.

The FOI request concerned the "Broadband Map" of March 2008, produced in the lead-up to the awarding of the NBS contract.

The nub of the ultimate decision just released (under Section 10 of the FOI Act) is that, because the Department did not keep an exact backup of the Map database at the time of the request, the "record" is deemed "not to exist" and is therefore exempt from release.

The Department's reason for not taking a back-up was..

"it was never intended for the database to be static until the final coverage map had been produced".

The Commissioner (who considers a database to be a single record), through her official, replied..

I cannot make any finding on the adequacy or otherwise of the Department's reasons for not taking a copy of the database so requested.

A method was suggested to substantially restore the database..

The Applicant's letter to this office of 17 November 2010 suggested that, by using date fields and filters, the Department could re-create the database as it stood on the appropriate date, by identifying, and excluding (or restoring) all records subsequently added to (or archived from) the system.

but the OIC Investigator took a different view.

I am not persuaded that the FOI Act requires such steps to be taken.

Along the way we get some insight into the Department's record keeping.

I understand that the Department holds over 3300 individual files on its network, containing the details on which the final and interim maps were based, and that a firm of consultants input these details into a database contained on a laptop that is held separate to the Department's network.

The request, dated 25 April 2008, was received by the Department on 28 April 2008. The Department states that, by this time, "the database would already have been significantly modified" from how it stood as at the date of production of the March 2008 map. I also understand that neither the Department, nor the consultant company that was involved in producing the maps on behalf of the Department, made backup copies or any other record of the details on the database on the dates that the interim maps were published. Neither were copies made on any other date; in fact, the Department has stated that the database the subject of the request was not backed up in any way. It has said that, if for some reason input data had been lost from the database, it would have had no way of re-creating the database other than by referring to the 3300+ files held on its network. While not expressing any view on the appropriateness of such an approach to safeguarding completed work, it would appear that by 28 April 2008, the database did not exist in the form as it had stood on the date of production of the March 2008 map, nor did there exist a copy of the database as it stood on that date. Thus, I consider it appropriate to find that the record the subject of the request no longer exists and that section 10(1)(a) applies.

We are therefore being asked to believe that ESRI (Ireland), the world leading provider of GIS software and services kept and carried out the mapping project on a single laptop over a period of 18 months without once taking a backup of the mapping data, and that the Department similarly failed to back-up, in any way, the primary data on which depended the key Communications project of the last four years.