I think resistance is extraordinarily hard to measure. It does go on at whatever level, but I think it's very much in the minority of cases. The problem is that a requester may see a delay as resistance, whereas the official will see it as the fact that unfortunately the response to the request has been delayed. It varies from department to department. Now that we're finally looking at local government, it varies from local authority to local authority. It depends on a range of things. For example, different departments deal with different sorts of information. Their leadership has different levels of enthusiasm for FOI, and all these things can make it rather uneven.
We expected, when we did this study, to find that while reporting of stories in the media would decrease trust, people who used FOI would increase their trust in government. We found that for central government that wasn't the case. What's interesting is that it seems that a lot of the people who use FOI are using it for a certain angle or perspective on an issue of importance to them. Sometimes it's an issue that's part of an ongoing conflict with a political authority or with someone related to it. So actually their trust wasn't very high to start with. FOI can act to confirm their distrust, if you see what I mean.