Copying without looking

Sometimes the BBC's wriggling over FOI requests is reminiscent of scenes from Alice in Wonderland. Here's the latest on attempts to get information about how much Jimmy Savile was paid over the years..

A request was submitted in January. At the end of March, the BBC, apparently generously, said that although "contributor files.. fall outside of the scope of the Act,  in this case the BBC is prepared to volunteer this information to you.  Due to the age of the files in question, it has proved difficult to scan pages in sufficiently high quality. I therefore propose sending the information to you in hard copy form."

Now we learn that the originals - many of them carbon copies - were sent outside the BBC to produce these  hard copies. So they WERE scanned, but not by the BBC, and instead of getting a digital copy  in the process, the BBC has only new paper copies. Which it hasn't got time or resources to SCAN. See ?  From the organisation that brought you the iPlayer.

Enjoy the detail of this letter, sent out at the end of last week...

As we have previously explained, the original documentation is over 1000 pages, much of which is carbon copy paper from the 1960s-70s. Our own photocopiers are unable to replicate a copy of a readable quality documents of this quality, so we have organised for a third party with appropriate technology to produce a photocopy on our behalf which we can post to you if required. 

We have not been able to scan this document to provide you with a copy via e-mail as the PDF document created by our scanning technology exceeds the size permitted to be saved and e-mailed by our systems. As I am sure you will appreciate, breaking the document down into more manageable chunks has significant staff time implications.