It is a sad fact of life that laws are sometimes passed which give real access to the state machine, yet are not really taken advantage by the average man on a bendy bus.
When it comes to the Freedom of Information Act I too was that man on the bendy bus.
But not anymore. Thanks to The Guardian's list of best web sites I was directed to: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com ...and very good it is too.
Very very good.
It takes out all the hard work of finding the email address of the relevant person in the organisation you want to question. All you have to do is formulate your request in a readable manner. You can also see the result of requests made by other people using this service. It's just a pity there isn't a central database of all requests.
So go forth and do as the 70s hippies used to say 'Question Authority'. You never know, you might even learn how many paperclips the Home Office uses each year, or how many illegal immigrants they have on security these days.
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