Mental Welfare Commission turn down Freedom of Information request

There's an interesting exchange between a Mr McLean and the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland (MWC) at What Do They Know.com?

Essentially, Mr McLean wishes to know "...the number of reported (alleged or  proven) cases of abuse (physical, sexual, verbal, and mental) of detained/sectioned patients in Scotland reported by anybody." Okay, the request is strangely formal, and there is some ambiguity about how aspects of abuse are defined, but some might consider this a reasonable request. One of the MWC's statutory duties is to protect the interests of those with mental disorder in Scotland (although the Commission tend to focus on detained patients). Their website states that they believe that everyone with a mental illness should: "have the right to live free from abuse, neglect or discrimination". Nothing to disagree with that statement.

Mr McLean has made a request for numbers (not patient details, obviously) of cases of abuse of detained patients in Scotland. Since detained patients come very much within the remit of the Commission, one might imagine that they would/ should know how many cases there have been involving alleged abuse. Of course, if the Commission haven't been notified then they might not have such information, but they should be able to provide the number of cases reported to the Commission in recent years.

However, the Commission has invoked section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 which means that they consider it too costly to provide such information. There is a general limit of £600, so if a public body thinks it will cost more than £600 to find the information, they don't have to provide it.

Of course, there may be some people who think that a public body whose duties include monitoring of abuse of people with mental illness should be able to count the number of cases of abuse of people with mental illness on its records without it costing more than £600. The Commission will probably have some kind of database, and as most people know, a database that can't output such simple counts of relevant records isn't up to much. From what I've heard, the Commission has adopted a relatively 'paperless' office and forms and documents tend to be scanned into the system.

Despite some of the ambiguous language of the request, I don't think it should be too hard to provide Mr McLean with the numbers of cases of abuse (however defined) of detained patients in Scotland that it has on its records, and the argument that it would cost too much seems more than a little spurious.