Tom Morrison returns with his quarterly review of the world of information law
2015 is a year for anniversaries. A ridiculous comment perhaps as by their nature all years are a year for anniversaries. What I mean is that as we start a new year having just celebrated the 30th anniversary of England and Wales’ first—albeit largely irrelevant—Data Protection Act, we are now commemorating 10 years of the full force of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FIA 2000). I have not got my dates wrong; it took five years to implement. This ground-breaking piece of legislation was far from irrelevant—how can anything described by a former Prime Minister as one of his biggest mistakes be irrelevant—and it marked a new era for the right of the public to know more about the decisions public authorities make in all our names.
March also represents the fifteenth anniversary of our first genuinely meaningful piece of data protection legislation—the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA 1998—which took nearly two years to be activated). DPA 1998 was a watershed for the protection of personal freedoms. It put in place
