9 March 2010

Mr S Hardwicke Carruthers

Via email ([FOI #28563 email])

Our ref: CS/10/015/HJP

(Please quote our reference when contacting us)

If telephoning contact Hilary Pook on 020 7217 4734

or if using email send to: h.pook@lgo.org.uk

Dear Mr Hardwicke Carruthers

Request for information

In your email of 8 February, you asked for details of the number of complaints that Jane Martin had personally determined in her first 20 days as Local Government Ombudsman (11 - 30 January 2010). You also wanted the decision type made, and for the delegated decisions made by staff in her office for the same period, and for the same data sets in relation to Tony Redmond and his staff, and Anne Seex and her staff. Then you asked for this information in relation to Jerry White and decisions made in his office for his last 20 days in post.

In order to decide whether or not this request is vexatious, I asked you for your reason for asking for a 20-day period. Your response was “20 days hath FOI”. You went on to say “I am very interested in a direct comparison between the decision making of the Ombudsmen over the 20-day period and am especially looking forward to comparing this with the productivity of Jerry White and his staff over the last 20 days that Jerry White was in office.”

You went on “Please supply the information requested as it allows direct comparison rather than different decisions in different months. The information should be easily accessible if you collect it for performance monitoring.”

I consider this to be a vexatious request, as provided by section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act.

I have asked you why you wanted the information specifically for a 20-day period and your response was that you are “interested” in it. You say it would provide a direct comparison “rather than different decisions in different months” but our normal monitoring data which we make available on our website would provide a direct comparison of the offices - just over a full month rather than for 20 days. Your failure to provide a serious reason suggests to me that the request has no serious purpose or value.

/…

Responding to this request would impose a significant burden on the Commission. You say “the information should be easily accessible if you collect it for performance monitoring” but we don't collect data for 20-day periods for performance monitoring. Also, we do not collect data on cases decided personally by the Ombudsmen (other than that we can easily determine how many reports were issued in a period). In other cases, the Ombudsmen may make a decision on a case, but the whole case will not necessarily be assigned to them on our computer database, so it would not be straightforward to extract that information.

For the reasons given above, I suspect the request is also designed to cause disruption or annoyance, or if not intended, it certainly has that effect.

Although this is your first request for information in 2010, you made 54 requests for information to the Commission in 2009 and 47 the year before that. I would suggest that the volume and nature of your requests is indicative of the pursuit of an unreasonable obsession. Given that many of your requests continue to be worded so as to elicit admissions of poor performance, I also consider them to constitute a campaign of harassment, even if that is not your intention.

That concludes my response. If you feel I have not dealt properly with your request, you have the right to appeal and, should you wish to do so, I can supply a copy our internal complaints procedure. If you do request an internal review - can you please indicate why you are unhappy with my response. You also have the right to apply to the Information Commissioner to determine whether your request has been properly dealt with. You should note however that the Commissioner will not consider any complaint where you have not first exhausted our internal complaints process or where there has been undue delay in contacting him. You will be able to obtain further details of the Information Commissioner's role from the website on www.ico.gov.uk.

Yours sincerely

Hilary Pook

Hilary Pook

Communications and Records Manager

LGO 01 (03/08)