Agenda item

The Panel received a report which set out the processes used by the Council to manage requests for information made under both Freedom of Information (FOI) and Data Protection (DP) legislation and provided an overview on how the Council complied with DP legislation, primarily the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

The Strategic Director of Commercial and Change (Strategic Director) provided an overview of the key areas, including what constituted a valid FOI or Environmental Information (EI) request, response timescales, charges and the internal management processes including the use of the request management system, Veritas and also the process for handling Subject Access Requests (SAR’s).

The Panel was informed that the number of requests received, their complexity and scope were increasing each year and the impact of the Data Protection Regulations in 2018 had accelerated this trend.

Members raised a number of issues and questions, which the Strategic Director responded to as follows:

·                     In respect of charges made for responding to FOI requests over an appropriate limit, the Panel was informed these were only made occasionally. The Strategic Director agreed to provide the Panel with details about the level and frequency of charges that have been made.

·                     In response to a question about whether information was publicly available about the types of requests already responded to, so that the public could check whether the same or similar request had already been made, the Strategic Director confirmed he would check where the requests and responses were published and how the public gained access or were signposted to these.

·                     With reference to 2020-21 (Q1) information, it was questioned why for Children’s Services/WCF there had been a reduction in the number of requests completed on time from 86.7% (2019/20) to 71.1%. The Strategic Director agreed to check the reasons for this including whether it related to COVID-19.

·                     Rather than recording the actual time taken to complete requests which could be difficult to do when several people were involved in responses, requests were categorised into 3 categories; less than 5 hours, between 5 and 15 hours and over 15 hours. Members felt there would be benefit from being able to be clearer on actual time taken to deal with requests for resourcing and evaluation purposes and suggested that a fourth category of less than an hour might be helpful for those simple requests that were easily and quickly dealt with. This would be given consideration as to whether this would be helpful going forward.

·                     The Strategic Director confirmed that the Council received requests that were also being issued to a large number of local authorities or other public bodies.  He explained that they liaised with colleagues in other authorities to keep abreast of current happenings.

·                     The Panel was informed that work was ongoing with partner authorities to develop protocols to look to reducing the very labour-intensive process that was currently involved in ensuring that information sent in response to SAR’s was appropriately redacted. The Strategic Director acknowledged that an automated system needed to be developed to aid this process and was currently being researched.

·                     The Panel was advised that areas of learning were picked up when there was an influx of similar enquiries or when a new service was developed. Signposting was added to the website to try to guide people more effectively to locate the information without having to submit an SAR.

·                     In response to the Panel’s request, FOI/SAR data would be incorporated into the quarterly Performance Monitoring report, so that Members could be better informed of the current situation.

The Chairman thanked the Strategic Director and his Team for a very comprehensive report, which had helped the Panel to gain a detailed  understanding of the significant level of requests that the Council received, the complex nature of many of these requests and the labour intensive processes in place to ensure they were handled correctly. These processes were carried out at a significant cost to the Council and it was felt that with the use of automation where appropriate in the future, these costs could be reduced.