Tag: FOI

Government consults on introducing £100 (papers) and £500 (hearing) fees for appeals to ICO decision notices

Government consults on introducing £100 (papers) and £500 (hearing) fees for appeals to ICO decision notices

Government consults on introducing £100 (papers) and £500 (hearing) fees for appeals to ICO decision notices

                                                 

ICO Information Commissioner's Office logo
ICO Information Commissioner’s Office logo

Four days ago the Ministry of Justice started consulting on increasing fees for various civil courts and tribunals. The consultation closes on the 15th September 2015.

This is what one of their consultation documents states:

First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber)
124. The General Regulatory Chamber hears a wide range of appeals on regulatory matters, for example charities, consumer credit, transport and appeals from decisions of the Information Commissioner. We do not currently charge fees for proceedings in this chamber, with the exception of appeals in relation to gambling licences. In these cases, the fee charged is based on the value of the licences that are in dispute. We are not proposing to change the fees for these proceedings.

125. In 2013–14 the estimated cost of the General Regulatory Chamber (including Gambling) was £1.6m. The fee income generated from Gambling proceedings (the only fee charging tribunal within the General Regulatory Chamber) was £11,600.

126. In the remaining jurisdictions within the General Regulatory Chamber, we have proposed one fee for an appeal decision on the papers and one fee for an oral hearing. Our proposal is to charge a fee of £100 to issue proceedings, which would entitle the claimant to a decision based on a review of the papers. The claimant may alternatively elect for an oral hearing, in which case a further fee of £500 would be payable. Based on current volumes, we estimate that this proposal would generate a cost recovery percentage of around 17% after remissions.

127. The fees will also apply to “reference” cases where cases are started in the first-tier Tribunal but have to be referred directly to the Upper Tribunal for a first instance hearing.

Questions
Question 14: Do you agree with the proposed fees for all proceedings in the General Regulatory Chamber: specifically £100 to start proceedings with a determination on the papers; and a further fee of £500 for a hearing? Please give reasons.

Question 15: Are there any proceedings in the General Regulatory Chamber that should be exempt from fees? Please give reasons.

I’d better explain a bit better what the above is about by explaining the process to making a FOI request.

You make a Freedom of Information Act request to a public body and if is turned down (whether in part or in full) you can ask the same public body for an internal review.

If at the internal review there is still information withheld and you feel that they shouldn’t have withheld the information you can appeal the internal review decision to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The Information Commissioner’s Office then look into the matter (which can take months as ICO have a backlog of cases) and issue a decision notice (sometimes even if the public body changes their mind and releases the information requested during this time). You can see an example of a decision notice ICO issued for a request I made to Wirral Council on ICO’s website here.

If either the public body or the person making the FOI request disagree with the decision notice, they have 28 days to appeal the decision to the First Tier Tribunal (Information Rights) which is part of the General Regulatory Chamber.

Appeals can then be made of decisions of the First Tier Tribunal (Information Rights) on a point of law only to the Upper Tribunal.

The consultation is proposing that if someone (whether the public body or the person making the request) wishes to challenge an ICO decision notice by appealing it to the First Tier Tribunal (Information Rights) that there will be a charge of £100 if the decision is made on the papers and £500 if a hearing is required.

The Panopticon blog has also written about this consultation (far more eloquently and in a more entertaining way than I could manage) in a piece headlined Circle the Wagons: They are Coming for the Information Tribunal.

So what do readers think about this proposed change? Most of the appeals to ICO decision notices to the First Tier Tribunal (Information Rights) are by litigants in person, who unless they fall into one of the categories of people who don’t have to pay fees a fee of £100 or £500 may make them think twice before appealing a decision.

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Cllr Ann McLachlan “the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people”

Cllr Ann McLachlan “the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people”

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Wirral Council’s Cabinet discuss freedom of information (19th June 2014) starts at 2:29 in the video above


Wirral Council’s Cabinet discuss the Freedom of Information Scrutiny Review (19th June 2014) L to R Cllr Stuart Whittingham, Cllr Bernie Mooney, Cllr Chris Jones, Shirley Hudspeth, Surjit Tour, Cllr Phil Davies, Graham Burgess

Cllr Ann McLachlan “the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people”

                         

Wirral Council’s Cabinet discussed the Freedom of Information Scrutiny report, the Cabinet report, report and final report of the scrutiny panel can be viewed on Wirral Council’s website. The reason for it being on Cabinet’s agenda is that it was referred to Cabinet by the Transformation and Resources Policy and Performance Committee on the 14th April. I wrote a transcript of what was said then back on the 17th April so I’ll be following the same format here.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES (Chair)
Right, which takes us on to item 16 in the governance, commissioning and improvement. It’s the freedom of information scrutiny review. This was a piece of work done under the Transformation and Resources Policy and Performance Committee. I’m delighted that Councillor Sykes, you’ve come along tonight to Cabinet and it’s really good that we’re giving you kind of an opportunity just to make to talk to the recommendations. OK, thank you.

COUNCILLOR ADAM SYKES
Chair, I’ll keep things brief because everyone eager to get home.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
What’s happening tonight?

COUNCILLOR ADAM SYKES
Apparently there’s some football. During the last municipal year, the Transformation and Resources Committee carried out a scrutiny review to look into the FOI performance of the Council. As we began the review, the Council already began taking steps to improve FOI response times after the Information Commissioner had investigated and asked us to make some improvements and I’d like you to know obviously that you know that improvement came, response times to over 85% now within the guidelines which has improved since this report was done.

Eight recommendations came out of the report which are detailed in the report so I won’t go through each individually but I’ll take any questions should people ask them. They basically covered a couple of areas, firstly having designated people who are responsible for FOI throughout the Council rather than the current situation which is different across the Council depending on departments which answer your question.

Also to produce a more consistent and robust process throughout the Council as to how the FOI request is tracked and how it proceeds to make sure things run on track and things move forward in a quick fashion. Finally, to also improve the monitoring for carrying out both the scrutiny duty in the, in the… finally note the improvement in that and also by councillors as well, a strategic review that the Council’s put in place. That’s the Chief Executive’s Strategy Group. So I’m happy to take any questions.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
Thanks for that Adam, I’m going to ask our Cabinet Member who this item comes under Councillor Ann McLachlan just to respond to this report, Ann over to you.

COUNCILLOR ANN MCLACHLAN (Cabinet Member for Governance, Commissioning and Improvement)
Yes thank you, well, Chair I’d like to start by congratulating Adam and Councillor Whittingham I believe and it’s Councillor Muspratt who formed this scrutiny review for Council and undertook what is an excellent piece of task and finish work really helping us to refine and you know be more efficient in dealing with a particular problem area and certainly it’s an excellent piece of work and I’d really like to congratulate you but as you’ve pointed out Adam there are eight recommendations which flow from your, from your review and as a result of that now in conjunction with Surjit [Tour], Head of the Legal Service I’ve now worked on an action plan to address those eight recommendations.

Just briefly I’d like to talk about that Chair and what those actions will be, but suffice to say that those actions will be implemented between now and December and we will have further reports to Cabinet and certainly to Council on those and they will include the nomination of champions. So a single point of contact for FOIs within departments and I understand the strategic directors and heads of service will be identified in nominating champions and that action will be done fairly soon.

There are a number of actions that are going to relate to our CRM which is our customer relationship management software system and we’re going to look at that in particular in a number of areas. One is how can we do better recording and monitoring to shorten the timescales when we receive FOI requests and also a solution possibly to look at how we capture all the information about an FOI before it’s actually disseminated so we’ve got it all in one place and a further piece of work is going to be undertaken with our software also to look at whether it’s actually fit for purpose to deal with some of these issues and if it is identified that we actually need a new kind of piece of software then we’re going to ask for a business case to be brought forward to show that we demonstrate that that’s going to you know have some good outcomes for us.

Also in terms of one of the recommendations that you made was you know at what level in an organisation are the FOIs dealt with. From the FOI reporting is now going to be escalated to the Chief Executive and his Strategy Group but also and I think quite importantly to go to the policy and performance committees into our new performance management framework now. So you can actually have much more oversight in terms of scrutiny of this area.

Another piece of work is going to be undertaken to identify all the new trends and themes really, so we can categorise FOIs. You know that the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people who request them but are some of those on particular trends and themes, when we could create something on our website which would be like frequently asked questions so that information is there it’s readily accessible.

What we want to do is make sure that we’re as open and transparent as we possibly can be in order that we can lessen the number of FOI requests that need to put through the Council. Another piece of work that we’ll be undertaking with our marketing team to look at how is information structured and accessed on our website in other words how accessible is information? If you come onto the Council’s website and you’re trying to find something out, how easy is it? So we’re going to ask the department to kind of market test queries and see whether we need to do some work there but I think all in all what this piece of, this exercise has demonstrated is that members [councillors] working together have come up with shared solutions that are going to help us to deal with this in a more effective way.

It is going to involve some of internal systems, some of our ICT but again I’d like to thank you and I’d also like to thank Surjit [Tour] and his team and those people that are going to undertake the workload going forward and I’ll be looking forward Chair to reporting to the Cabinet and Council on what I hope will be you know will be a more successful story going forward in terms of the numbers of requests that we’re receiving. OK, thank you.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
OK, thanks Ann, well can I suggest we agree kind of Ann’s sort of plan for taking this work forward and that means, I’d just like to reiterate I think it’s been a really excellent piece of work by the scrutiny team so well done Adam to you and your colleagues and thanks for coming along tonight to take us through it. OK, thanks very much. OK

COUNCILLOR ADAM SYKES
OK, I’d just thank the Cabinet Member and the officers for their response in a positive way in moving this forward and I’m grateful for the recommendations.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
OK, thanks very much. OK, so we’ll agree that as a way forward. Is that agreed Cabinet?

CABINET
Agreed

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
Thank you.

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FOI request – Freedom of Borough – £2k so far and counting

I’ve just received a partial answer to my request and I am to be quite frank staggered by the costs so far in awarding a person Freedom of the Borough.

The buffet was £705, the alcohol £121.15, flowers were £30, a photographer was a staggering £258.50 (to take a few photos)! and the scroll was £846.

So far that’s £40 shy of £2000. Bear in mind although this is a public meeting any members of the public are kept away from the alcohol & buffet (which the public have paid for) and told they can’t sit anywhere in the public gallery they’d actually be able to see how at least £2k of their money is being spent.

157 guests were invited and 110 turned up.

I will point out at this stage, I’m not in any way criticising Steve Maddox getting Freedom of the Borough, but at a time when Wirral Council is making people redundant, personally it just doesn’t seem right to be spending so much. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be money spent on awards and ceremony it’s just the taxpayer should know that its money is being spent prudently.

The original report stated “There are no staffing implications arising out of this report; there may be some modest financial implications which can be accommodated from within existing budgets.”

Clearly Jim Wilkie’s view of “modest financial implications” are different to mine!

Freedom of Information & Wirral Council. Do officers get paid overtime for attending meetings?

Freedom of Information & Wirral Council. Do officers get paid overtime for attending meetings?

                                            

I have today received an apology from Wirral Council about a Freedom of Information Act request submitted on the 1st December 2010.

The request here is basically an answer to the question, “How much does it cost to award someone Freedom of the Borough?” which I wrote about before on this blog when it happened earlier this year.

As readers may recall Wirral Council was "named and shamed" by the Information Commissioner in October for taking too long to respond. Quite what the monitoring being done by the Information Commissioner isn’t gone into detail.

As pointed out when he was awarded Freedom of the Borough, Steve Maddox had had to sit through many years of Council meetings and had never been asked to say anything. Whereas I understand the logic of the Chief Officers being there, the only one I’ve known be asked anything (in recent times) is Bill Norman about who had seen the infamous Charteris report into the library closures (and the odd procedural question).

Either the Chief Officers of Wirral Council come to meetings on a purely voluntary basis or they are paid overtime. The table below shows how much they got paid last year (although there have been some controversial changes uprating them since).

Senior Officers Remuneration (Wirral Council) 2009-10
Senior Officers Remuneration (Wirral Council) 2009-10