Dear Health Research Council of New Zealand,

Please make available the following information.

All minutes of all Grant Assessment Committee meetings for the last 5 years. There should be no redaction of identities as these are minutes of meetings of an official public body.

All scores of all grant applications for the last 5 years. This should include scores at each stage of the assessment (including, panel scoring at each stage (by individual if possible) and reviewer scores) and final outcome. While it is appreciated that reviewer identities might want to be protected it would be preferable if all applicant information and committee member information is provided (for the purposes of statistical analysis). Certainly panelist identities should be provided as they are acting as public servants.

In particular, we refer the Council to Section 6 of the Offical Information Act '...information shall be made available unless there is good reason for withholding it' and we see no "good reason" for any of this information to be withheld from public scrutiny.
Yours faithfully,

Gael Wright

Dear HRC,
Thank you for your initial reply to my FOI request. I can appreciate that the HRC does not want to spend too much time collating data.

However, the data (scores) must be held in electronic format (databases or spreadsheets). The HRC can simply make the unedited source data available (spreadsheets). If it were on a database then presumably some simple lookups could be used to produce the data in a few minutes.

Note : the HRC has a stated aspirations goal of transparency yet it has so far been reluctant to assist the first FOI request made to it. Simply citing the number of data points requested is disingenuous if the data is held in electronic format.

Kind Regards,
Gael

Dear HRC,

Each year HRC allocates approximately $60 million in taxpayer money to Health Research in New Zealand. That is >$300 million for the requested period. Yet, the HRC provides no information for the general public to assess whether the allocation of those funds has been made fairly (apart from outlining the process). If the HRC does not see that lack of transparency as an issue then that is telling in and of itself.

1. Has the HRC performed internal (statistical) audits of the scores and allocations?. Can they make those audits available ? The provision of such audits might satisfy this FYI request provided they have been performed to an adequate standard. If you are saying that you have not performed internal audits around the allocation of $300 million of taxpayer money then it only increases the importance of making the requested information available or for the scores to be released so members of the general public can do it themselves. It is our intention to perform such an audit.

2. Perhaps the HRC could be more helpful and outline what electronic format the data are held in and explain why it would be so difficult to send data held in electronic format. The only reason I can see that the number of items of data for collation would be an issue would be if information were held only on paper (?).

3. From the first to second request the HRC has added extra stipulations around privacy that were not contained in the initial response (but are suspiciously similar to a parallel FOI request). Although parts of Statute are copied and pasted there is no explanation as to how the requested data would meet those particular guidelines - perhaps you can elaborate on how the requested information would impact on the privacy provisions quoted? Apart from names no personal information has been requested.

We are empowered to refer to this case to the ombudsman if necessary. We also note from the Ombudsman guidelines

"The fact that information will be published online is not a reason in itself for refusing a request
for official information. Publication of information released in response to official information
requests has always been a possibility. Agencies have never been able to control what a
requester does with the information they receive (unless there is a valid basis for imposing
conditions13). However, it may be one factor to take into account in considering whether or not
there is good reason to withhold the information.
On the one hand, it is possible that online publication of the information may be more likely to
cause prejudice to the interests protected by the withholding grounds. For instance, online
publication may be more likely to impinge on the privacy of natural persons, or to
unreasonably prejudice the commercial position of a third party, than release to a particular
requester with conditions where necessary.
On the other hand, online publication may lend weight to the public interest in disclosure,
because the information will become available to the general public and not just the requester. "

If the HRC is concerned about privacy they can potentially release information to just the requester.

We look forward to your reply and are willing to refer this issue to the ombudsman for arbitration. Given the request involves the audit of 100s of millions of taxpayer dollars we believe there is significant public interest and a strong case for making these data available.

Yours sincerely,

Gael Wright

Dear Lon, Lana,

My request was closed on the grounds that I did not reply by July 28th.. However, it is on the public record that I did send reply on July 24th (although I did receive an out of office reply).
No one has yet to respond to my scope narrowing suggestions in that email. I suggest this request be re-opened else I will have to restart the process.
I have emailed directly previously.

Yours sincerely,

Gael Wright

Dear HRC

Thank you for your reply and providing some background about the audits done. New Zealand is an unusually small funding environment with limited numbers of researchers. In particular we would like to analyse whether there are any biases in the panel decision making processes. For example, do past and present panel member applications get treated more generously than other proposals. This is a critically important in ensuring the entire process is fair to all applicants.

HRC holds all the data to test this question in an unbiased manner. For example, we propose to look at the panel scores and compare them to reviewer scores and look for discrepancies between the two aggregate scores (if they exist). If they do exist then it could be determined analytically what the cause of this might be....

Since the dataset held by the HRC is large this can be definitively. We request the data such that we can perform this analysis. Having all the data (all panels) allows more test sensitivity. We do not require the identities of reviewers. We don't need the identities of the applicants or panel members either but that would require HRC to perform significant work to blind the application scores. We are happy to do this ourselves to reduce your workload. We note that we can treat the data provided in confidence.

Yours sincerely,

Gael Wright

Dear Lon, Lana,

Change of Scope:

Thank you for the recent reply. The charging requested is however beyond the financial means of this private citizen. The HRC still has not articulated how S9(2) apply in this situation which I presume accounts for most of the work. I also note that if the HRC kept a best practise modern database system then the requested information would take less than an hour with a well constructed database query.....

As such, I would like to simplify and change my initial request.

Here instead I simply ask for the identities of panel members adjudicating on panel/programme grants over the last 5 years.

If you could also provide the information on those investigators who received programme/project grants for the last 5 years. I note that only information on the principal investigator is available online. However, no information on (FTE-costed) co-investigators is available to the general public.

Yours sincerely,

Gael Wright