Agenda item

The Cabinet Member with responsibility for Corporate Services and Communication (CMR) and the Strategic Director of Commercial and Change had been invited to update the Panel on how the Council complies with requests for information made under the freedom for information and data protection legislation.

The CMR commented that this was an issue that the Panel had delved into in the past in some detail and that it had been recognised that there was a difficult balance between what service was reasonable to offer and the strain on services that resulted. He was striving to ensure that the launch of the website in the future would mitigate some of the issues so that the public could have access to questions that had already been asked. He also wanted to focus on the FOI’s which were sent to all local authorities in general and the time and resource implications of this. The Strategic Director advised that they tried to make the process as efficient as possible and that new systems were in place to assist with this process. He highlighted that pre-publishing of information was a useful way forward so that enquirers could be signposted to the relevant information on the website. He reported that all staff were required to complete mandatory training on this issue, so knowledge levels and understanding were good. Whilst the numbers of cases had been slowly rising in recent years, there had been an improvement in performance, however, the complexity of cases had increased, leading to a greater level of work needed to respond which was more costly.

Members asked a range of questions, responses to which are set out below:

·         A question was raised as to how the Council held up the 7 key principles, referred to in paragraph 8 of the report. The Strategic Director advised that they were taken very seriously, and the Information and Governance Compliance Manager (IGCM) added that there was a balance between the theory and the practice, and that their work had to be based on the purpose of what the Council does. She felt confident that the team’s advice and guidance arrangement worked well with staff making good use of this service. They were currently proactively working on programmes relating to data minimisation and storage limitation. Whilst the Council was not there yet, there was a continual improvement process in these areas.

·         The impact on available budgets to resource the data requests was raised. The IGCM explained that data protection requests were not time limited, some Subject Access Requests (SAR’s) for instance from care leavers, led to a huge amount of work because of the quantity of records involved and the need for them to be carefully worked through and information redacted where other persons were referred to.  In terms of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, the Panel was advised the first 18 hours of work could not be charged for, but that any additional hours could be, provided the person making the request was notified first.

·         Considering the care leavers situation referred to above, a Member suggested that such requests could be pre-empted and all care leavers given this information automatically. Whilst the Cabinet Member suggested this might be achievable in the future when records were all digitalised, unfortunately it was not something they would seek to do at this time, with the Strategic Director advising that it would create a huge additional pressure on resources.

·         The Chairman commented that she was pleased to see the overall improvements shown in the data. In terms of FOI requests, she queried whether in a situation where protesters were making requests would these be classed as FOI requests. The IGCM advised that all requests were treated as anonymous and there could be no account taken as to who was making the request. An FOI had to be in written form and if a protestor was seeking ‘recorded’ information then that would a valid FOI request. If on the other hand they were seeking an opinion, that would not be a valid FOI request, unless the opinion was written down within the Council. For requests made under the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) she highlighted that a request was still valid if it was made orally.

·         Noting that the costs of processing FOI and EIR requests was increasing, the Panel asked that details of the specific figures be supplied to the Panel. The Strategic Director confirmed that he would be able to supply this information from the quarterly reviews of budgets.

·         The Cabinet Member stressed that technology was the answer to making these processes more streamlined in the future. With a FOI knowledge base, people would be able to check this before they submitted a request.  The IGCM advised that the publication scheme was being revised, so it was clear all the information that had been published by the Council.