A little while ago I blogged here how I had made an application to the Arts Council under the new Freedom of Information Act. I was looking for documentation surrounding the collapse of the LUX media arts centre in London. The Arts Council had twenty days to reply, so I was pleasantly pleased to receive my first response in a much shorter time. Not that it gave me anything:
We have now reviewed your request for information under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Your request is very broad and encompasses a wide range of information from many files held by Arts Council England. As a result of this we consider it would be excessively costly to comply. You are welcome to re-submit your enquiry by making it more specific (eg you may consider restricting your request to documents produced between specific dates).
Following this, I had a chat with the office of the Information Commissioner to clarify a few things. The main thing that I now understand is that the Arts Council have to help me with this request. While their response so far is fairly helpful, there is a bit more I need to know. FoI requests are a bit strange. If the cost of the request is estimated to be more than £450 to retrieve, the body can just refuse to do it. This £450 equals eighteen hours of work, so you can imagine that quite a bit of information can be retrieved in this time. Also, the body is not allowed to use the fact that their retrieval system is crap as an excuse. They are assumed to have an efficient retrieval system.
The Arts Council did supply me with quite a good list of what they have on the subject:
Grant Title
95-998 Payments 1-7
95-998 Post Completion
96-2295 Application material
96-2295 Final report documentation
96-2295 Lottery application information
96-2295 Monitoring file
96-2295 Payments 11-15
96-2295 Payments 1-7
96-2295 Payments 9-10Information held by the visual arts department:
- LFMC Contingency bid/funding (1998/9)
- LVA/Lux Capital funding (Capital)
- The Lux Centre Stabilisation bid/review (Stabilisation)
- London Moving Image Review (led by the former London Arts board)
- numerous internal memos/emails relating to Lux
- some correspondence with London Film and Video Development Agency, London Arts, British Film Institute, Film Council, etc (relating toStabilisation, Lux Centre liquidation, London Moving Image Review)
- minutes of Arts Council Artists' Film and Video Advisory Group meetings (from late 1990s)
- some correspondence relating to London Filmmakers' Co-op ACE Contingency Fund
The big issue for me now is to make a new request for the correct subset of this information. I want to get the useful stuff about what happened and what was done about it, not the background stuff. I need to know how the AC has arrived at its estimate of time involved, and which types of document are causing problems. I could guess it is the emails and memos, but have no way of knowing. I can't imagine personally that this sort of information could take so long to retrieve, unless in involves sorting through thousands of email archives or shipping boxes of documents back from a warehouse in Wales. Anyway, remember they have to help me, so I am now waiting for the help.
And just to wrap up, they do usefully let me know that part of my request is nothing to do with them:
The Lux Centre organisation was formed by two separate organisations who merged after they moved into the Lux building. They were not Arts Council clients - the Lux Centre briefly became a client of our visual arts department and then, as a result of changes in the internal structures of the arts funding system, it was a client of London Arts Board. Subsequently London Arts merged with the Arts Council.
We do not hold information on the design and build of the Lux Centre as this was led by the British Film Institute and London Film and Video Development Agency. Also, I understand that it was BFI and LFVDA who were signatories to the premises lease - this was not something Arts Council England was involved with.
More to follow as and when, I'm sure.
