Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:51:17 +0100
Subject: Re: Freedom of Information request - FOI internal reviews
From: Ganesh Sittampalam <
[FOI #11047 email]>
To: FOICOMMONS <
[email address]>
Dear Mr Castle,
Would you be able to extend the spreadsheet you already sent to
cover the historic requests? Much of the work required to do that
would also be needed in complying with the S42 code of practice, so
you could kill two birds with one stone.
It would be helpful if you could also provide some internal
tracking number or identifier so that I could then easily ask for
more details of a selected set of requests.
Regards,
Ganesh
-----Original Message-----
Dear Mr Sittampalam,
I am grateful to you for your email of 30 June. It is clear that
your simple request from late May has been overlooked and this is
to be regretted. I will not offer excuses other than to say that
times have been interesting - and will continue to be so for some
weeks to come. I can only apologise for this oversight and look to
provide a response and follow up as quickly as possible. Perhaps we
could start by exploring further...
We have looked at the history of your request on whatdotheyknow.com
and have identified your request as follows:
"I'd like to know how long it would take to inspect each file to
see how long the internal review took, and how long it would take
to actually extract the information requested for each case that
took longer than 20 days. "
Also, section 42 of the FOI code of practice
(
http://www.foi.gov.uk/reference/imprep/c...) says that you should
publish statistics on how successful you are on meeting complaints:
have you done this and if so where can I find it? (I did have a
look in your publication scheme but couldn't find anything) "
In your original request you asked for all Freedom of Information
requests made where an internal review has been requested and which
took longer than 20 working days to conduct the review, or where
the review is still outstanding and 20 working days have elapsed.
You asked for the text of the original request and of the internal
review request (without the requestor's name), any reasons for the
review taking longer than the ICO guidelines, and the relevant
dates [submission of the original request, original response,
internal review request and, where relevant, internal review
response].
Our response provided a summary of around 40 cases dating back to
the start of 2008 - in total there have been around 100 reviews.
The time consuming part of your request is retrieving and
summarising/extracting each request and identifying and retrieving
any reasons for the review taking longer than the current ICO
guidelines -e.g., looking to see if there is any information held
about the time taken to complete each review. In total this is
estimated as requiring at least 30 minutes per case. However, even
then it is unlikely that from the information held in relation to
each request it will be possible to determine why each took the
time they did especially when the target given was 30 days.
Section 42 of the code of practice states that public authorities
should determine their own target times for dealing with complaints
and that these should be published. In addition it states that
public authorities should publish information as to how successful
it is with meeting those targets. Our target times are set out on
our website but we do not publish stats about meeting these
targets. We will be reviewing our processes when the dust settles.
I am happy to explore this with you so that we can identify what
might be provided.
Yours sincerely,
Bob Castle
Head of Information Rights and Information Security
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