Dear Mr Nunn,

Your request for review under the Freedom of Information Act 2000

Thank you for your email to the Cornwall Council (“the Council”) dated 16 November 2009, which has been dealt with as a request for review under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“the Act”). Please accept my apologies for the delay of my response.

An independent officer, Matthew Stokes (Corporate Governance and Commercial
Group Manager, Legal and Democratic Services) has reviewed the Council's response to your original request dated 10 October 2009, for the number of Local Government Act Part III Section 32(3) notices each council has been served with by the Local Government Ombudsman (“LGO”), and the number of times the LGO has found each council guilty of maladministration for misusing a Section 32(3) notice.

Matthew Stokes agrees with the Council's original response to you. Matthew has checked the 2007, 2008 and 2009 reviews by the LGO for each of the former seven Councils in Cornwall which are freely available on the LGO web site and none of those reviews make any mention of any use of notification under section 32(3) of the 1974 Act or any finding of maladministration as a result of the use of such notification procedure.  The link below will take you to the front page of Council's Performance and from there the reviews to which we have referred can be accessed. 

http://www.lgo.org.uk/CouncilsPerformance/

To properly address your request would require an analysis of every file for each of the seven Councils for the last five years to ascertain whether section 32(3) had been invoked and if so what the outcome of that was.  It is perfectly in order for any notifications to the LGO to be held on the relevant file rather than in a central record.  That we have moved from seven Councils to one is an added complication but we cannot change that.  If we are to review every LGO file for the seven authorities for the last five years the likely time that it will take will exceed the the appropriate limit in terms of cost and we do not consider it appropriate to divert resource to deal with that aspect of your request and so it is being declined again for this reason.

The Council will provide you with the reports that have been presented to the seven Councils on the LGO statistics, and this information will be sent to you on or before 15 January 2010.

We hope this response is satisfactory. However should you not be satisfied with our response and wish to complain about the outcome of your review please write to:

FOI/EIR Complaints Resolution
Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Please quote the complaint reference number above in any communications with the Council.

Yours sincerely

Sarah White

Policy Officer - Business Intelligence

Chief Executive's Department

Tel: 01872 326413

Email: [Cornwall Council request email]

Cornwall Council, County Hall
Truro, TR1 3AY

Tel: 0300 1234 100 www.cornwall.gov.uk