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Tuesday, 3 February 2009

Daily Telegraph on Disappearing FOI Responses

Daily Telegraph journalist Alex Singleton blogged today about our observation that the BBC had erased 90% of TV Licence-related Freedom of Information Act responses from its website.

You may remember that we broke this story in December 2008. We passed our observations to Alex for further investigation and he's obviously looked into the issue. He's written a great piece, but unfortunately forgot to mention us!

When asked about the vanishing documents the BBC press office said they had updated the archives to make them more navigable to Joe Public.

A BBC spokesman said: "We regularly remove older responses in order to keep the publication scheme relevant, up-to-date, and easy to navigate. The publication scheme was updated at the end of 2008, in accordance with Information Commissioner Office guidance, and a number of older requests covering a wide range of issues were removed."

So it appears the timing of the BBC's mass deletion - in the same month the Corporation faced extremely uncomfortable scrutiny over the Ross/Brand/Sachs incident - was completely coincidental.

Yeah, right - we're not as green as we're cabbage looking!

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