Information, information, information.

Is the Freedom of Information Act being misused just to provide one-day-wonder stories for the media? I ask the question because the lead story on the BBC News yesterday was that the Prison Service had no overall statistics on the number of prisoners who had absconded from open prisons and were still on the run. The Director General of the Prison Service was interviewed on air, and made it clear that this was a statistic which neither he nor the Police required to do their job, and that he could track individually each prisoner and say whether he was in prison, and if so where, or whether he had absconded and was still at large. So what was the story - was there a story? If there was, it simply seemed to be that the BBC was asking for a statistic which wasn't available, and which no-one, apart possibly from the BBC, had any use for. Doubtless the Prison Service will now have to start keeping this useless statistic, and that will doubtless cost money. Does this make any sense?