Thanks for a speedy response.
Please forward my request to the Programme and Project Management Office for a review of the application. I'll number my arguments why the FOI request should be dealt with by OFWAT and not individual water companies so that you can deal with each reason separately.
1. Scope of enquiry: fluoridation is overseen at a national level and not by water companies. OFWAT is a national regulator.
2.
Ultra vires: water companies are supposedly legally powerless, in principle,
to decide whether or not to fluoridate a customer or passer-by. It is clear https://twitter.com/
3. Oversight in practice: Water companies do not control the purity or otherwise of the fluoridation reagent.
4. Competence: water companies are not the competent authorities who set and monitor standards for toxicological hazards therefrom.
5. Competence: Water companies are not the competent authority for ionising radiation hazards.
6. Frantic buck-passing: the water companies may simply point any FOI request at PHE or its regional representatives. PHE may equally try to dispose of the issue by pointing at the water authorities, or the Ministry of Health. Bad things happen when state actors absolve themselves of responsibility by hiding behind organisational walls. www.nfl.si/new_doctors If you don't know, and your gut response is to hide, they probably feel the same way about people's fluoridatedness in those other offices too.
7. Perception of bias: unfluoridated people might suspect that fluoridated people in Birmingham saying being fluoridated is not something that can be questioned confirms rather than denies our suspicions, contrary to a more science-based approach. https://is.gd/DtAqsA
8.
Breadth of scope of the request: it pertains to issues of water quality
unrelated to dental health, or human health (but additionally to these). What
all these issues retain in common is that they relate to the water supply. https://twitter.com/
9.
Manipulation of the enquiry to promote fluoridation: in PHE's
promotion/defence of putting fluoride in people, the reputation of water is
being tarnished by its use as a PR tool, to misdirect consumers and public
representatives. For OFWAT to insist the water companies - who let us recall
are claiming to be helpless - answer on the issue only aids this deceit by
reinforcing the intended psychological association between fluoride and water in
the perception of the patients, as in advertising gimmick. This
can also be viewed from the perspective of blurring the target of fluorides in
the public imagination, encouraging apathy, and assisting the psychology of
denial. People are still falling for it in the strangest places: https://twitter.com/
10. Confirmation bias: water companies who fluoridate their customers must at least in an emotional sense already consider their product "wholesome" and are hardly likely to dig for evidence to the contrary.
11. Other disincentives to complying: if providing such evidence led to the cessation of the fluoridation of water customers in the UK, operational or financial difficulties might ensue for the companies, which additionally disincentivises cooperation. Water companies could prefer to be fined for not handling the request, to the financial and reputational risk of supplying any such information, as this is simply a legal cost of fluoridation against all of which they are indemnified.
12. Universality: The topic is of equal interest to all persons, travelling or residing in the UK, and consuming fluoridated products and/or water prepared nationally, whether they are customers of a particular water company or not.
13.
Avoidance of mess: Information requested of different water companies may be
fragmentary or inconsistent in its presentation https://twitter.com/
14. Water consumers do not all think like lawyers or bureaucrats: OFWAT and the Drinking Water Inspectorate are the most logical, economic and efficient port of call for the information requested, and while those of us in the know are used to fluoride being the exception to every rule, no reasonable member of the public would expect OFWAT to claim that putting fluoride in them via the water system has nothing to do with the water regulator, and;
15.
Circular thinking: water companies intend to answer only to themselves. https://twitter.com/
