mdeuk
commented
2 years ago The fact we dealt with that by just adding the public holiday into the system makes me wonder if this is actually an issue at all.
It is an issue - the complaint we got rested on the fact that we hadn't added a Scottish bank holiday - so whilst it seemed, on the face of things, to be a little silly, as it was a public body in Whitehall, their complaint wasn't without merit [^1].
Section 10(6) FoIA 2000 states:
… “working day” means any day other than a Saturday, a Sunday, Christmas Day, Good Friday or a day which is a bank holiday under the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 in any part of the United Kingdom.
(my emphasis)
I think we've encountered two edge cases here - but if it is simple to fix then it would be good to do so, as it gives more flexibility, and allows for mistakes to be corrected.
[^1]: by not having the holiday in, we had some users that received prompts to send chasers / request internal reviews a day before they ought to have received them. This caused some discontent, as the public body still had a little bit of time on the clock. Naturally, waiting until day 20 is not the best, but I digress.
It has been reported that currently the addition of a new public holiday does not impact in-progress requests.
New bank holidays may be announced at short notice.
In addition, in the past we have had the occurrence on WhatDoTheyKnow of us accidentally omitting a public holiday, and only noticing when requests for which a deadline calculation involved the day in question started to be made. The fact we dealt with that by just adding the public holiday into the system makes me wonder if this is actually an issue at all.