Report of the Strategic Director, Corporate Services and Governance

A report was presented to provide the Committee with details of the number of requests for information received under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2017.  The request handling procedure was developed in response to the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which placed legal obligations on public authorities to deal with written requests for information held by them, in recorded form at the time a request is made.

The procedure has three steps, the first of which is ‘providing the information’ requested within the statutory timescale of 20 working days.  There is an electronic tracking system in which to log requests.   This tracking system provides a full audit trail of how the request has been handled and provides template response letters, which fulfil the statutory requirements of the Act.

The first stage relies on quickly providing the information requested, subject to the application of any exemption and payment of any necessary fee.  The second stage requires the Council to have an internal review process so that, if a requester is dissatisfied, they have an avenue of complaint, which is separate from the corporate complaints process.

The third stage give the requester the right of appeal to the Information Commissioner if he/she is still dissatisfied, following the internal review.

1617 requests were received during the period 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2017, this represents a 34.7% increase on requests received in the previous year and a 685.7% increase since the implementation of the Act in 2005. 

Of the requests received 90.48% were dealt with within the 20 day timescale.  This represented a decrease of 3.77% in performance on the 2016 figure of 94.25% but is still high amongst other Councils.

Two requests were subject to internal review and the original decision maker’s decision was upheld in both cases.

Two requesters have exercised the right of appeal to the Information Commissioner.  The Information Commissioner upheld our decision to withhold information.  One related to pre-planning application advice and another to a prosecution case.

Most requests come in by email now, 1605 by email, 21 by letter.   Requests for information vary considerably and are difficult to categorise.  We receive a lot about procurement and contracts, some environmental information requests, some asking for information about staff, some asking for policies and information about how decisions have been made.

As a result of reducing resources and in an effort to continue to improve the timeliness of responses and minimise the impact of any increase in requests the following measures have been taken:

·         Services are now proactively publishing more information online, as information published online is exempt from disclosure under the Act as it is “information easily accessible by other means”, all staff have to do is send the requester a link to where they can obtain the information.

·         Published data as required by the “Transparency Agenda”

·         Trained more information champions in March 2018 to replace staff who have left.

Further information was requested regarding trends and types of FOIs received.

RESOLVED -  That the information contained within the report be noted.  That further information and analysis, if available, would be included in the end of year performance report which will be discussed at the next meeting.