CARMARTHENSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000

INTERNAL APPEAL-DECISION NOTICE-EDWIN MORRIS

Date of Decision: - 14^th January 2010

Dear Mr Morris

I refer to the e-mails that you received from us dated 14^th and 18^th December 2009 and I am now in a position to determine your appeal. I set out in the Appendix to this notice the full history of the matter, and I have highlighted the questions raised by you.

MY DETERMINATION

Section 1 of the Act states that a person making a request for information to a public authority is entitled to be informed in writing whether it holds information of the description specified in the request, and if that is the case, to have that information communicated to him.

In your e-mail dated 5^th September 2009 you asked whether the Council censored any political parties. In my e-mail dated 21^st October, I said that your question did not amount to a request for information for the purposes of the Act. In your e-mail dated 18 November, you asked whether the council was putting any blocking type software onto our library internet machines to prevent access to British political parties & their websites.

In my view, your request dated 18^th November does not strictly qualify as a request for information for the purposes of the Act. However, in order to make progress I am prepared to treat it as an appeal under the Act. In assisting me with your appeal, the Council's Information Technology Unit, have confirmed to me the essence of their earlier advice to you:-

“The Council does utilise software called Websense to filter web content. However, provided any website is correctly categorised by Websense, (i.e. a political party's website is identified as such) then the system is set up to allow access. In other words, the system is not set up to prevent access to any political parties. However, there may be cases where such as site is blocked where Websense detects malicious software on a site or finds inappropriate content. The Council has not set up this software to do this. If you are aware of an instance where a political party's website has been blocked, please provide the name of the library where this took place, the date and which website was blocked. This will enable us to search our records and probably identify the incident.”

In the absence of any further information from you, I believe that officers would be left with the task of checking a very substantial volume of records in order to find out whether any political party website had been blocked, but this is not to say that the Council does hold recorded information that might fall within the scope of the request.

If the Council did hold the information, then Section 12 of the Act states that a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request if it considers that to do so would exceed the appropriate limit. This limit currently stands at £450, which equates to 18 hours of work. The appropriate limit could clearly be exceeded in this case.

However, I have come to the conclusion that the Council does not in fact hold any recorded information on this subject, taking into account the way in which the question has been put, and in the absence of any further clarification from you to enable officers to begin any meaningful search of our records. Please therefore treat this document as formal refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act.

YOUR RIGHT OF FURTHER APPEAL

You now have a right of appeal against my decision to:-

The Information Commissioner

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely

Lyn Thomas

Head of Administration and Law