Dear Mr Sundimalt,

Freedom of Information request internal review

Apologies for delay in responding to your Freedom of Information complaint of 21 April

In your complaint you state that “I have received a reply by letter 6 April 2009 from Tim Fairhurst (Strategic Housing Manager - North Team) who has provided misleading information according to many complaints that have been submitted by others and me. Therefore I ask that you read Tim Fairhurst reply and further investigate his response.”

Your original request of 10 March was for “how many complaints were made against the Area Service manager and the Nuisance and Anti-Social Behaviour Officer working at Lambeth Living Ltd, 91 Kennington Lane, London SE11 4HQ by the residents for the period April 2008 - February 2009”

I am also aware that you made a request of 29 April for very similar information to your original request, namely:

“how many formal and informal complaints of mismanagement were made against the Strategic Housing Manager, Area Service Manager and Nuisance & Anti Social Behaviour Officer working at Lambeth Living Ltd, 91 Kennington Lane, London SE11 4HQ by the residents for the period June 2008 - April 2009.”

Please treat this internal review, as a response to both your complaint and your later request.

Tim Fairhurst in his email of 6 April stated that “since June 2009, when Lambeth Living took on management of Lambeth Council's housing stock, there have been eight formal complaints about employees in the North Lambeth Area Housing Office. One of these related to Mrs D'Cruze and none about Mr Adetifa.”

The above statistics were correct and relate to formally registered complaints held on our Respond (Corporate Complaints) system.

Recently the North Lambeth Area Housing Office has received two further formal complaints. Although neither relates to the individuals you have requested information on. In addition, the North Lambeth Area Housing Office have received a petition against the Nuisance and Anti-Social Behaviour Officer signed by 10 residents one of whom is yourself.

The difficulty in providing further figures from our records here is that individuals raise less formal complaints about staff members, which are mainly focused on service delivery rather than staff members themselves and they are recorded as such on our systems. It would be extremely difficult to provide further meaningful figures from our systems about complaints made against individual staff members, without undertaking an extremely detailed search of the paper and electronic case records held. Such work would undoubtedly require a manual review of 1000s of records to identify relevant complaints for inclusion in any statistics provided. This work would involve over 18 hours effort and be in excess of the Freedom of Information Act's cost ceiling. In that regard the section 12 Freedom of Information cost ceiling exemption applies.

However, I can advise that our Strategic Housing Manager (North Team) estimates that you have made the following informal complaints:

Also listed below are those other informal complaints that our Strategic Housing Manager (North Team) is aware of (without doing a detailed search of our records, which as explained above would exceed the Freedom of Information Act's cost ceiling).

I trust that the above information provides the necessary clarity. Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require further information.

If you remain dissatisfied with the outcome of this review you have a further right to appeal to the Information Commissioner, who regulates the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act. The Commissioner can be contacted at the following address:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Enquiry line: 01625 545745

Yours sincerely,

Ian Goodwin

Information Governance Manager

Direct Line: 020 79262341

Email: [email address]

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London Borough of Lambeth

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