Complaints

Dear Mr Nunn,

Thank you for your recent request. We can now respond as follows.

I would firstly confirm that the Council logged 947 complaints on its
corporate complaints system between 1st October 2007 and 20th September
2008. I should point out that there are complaints which fall outside of
the corporate complaints process which are not recorded centrally, such as
those relating to Children's Services.

During this time we received 35 complaints from the Ombudsman's Office,
however not all of these were actively pursued by the Ombudsman. This
equates to 3.69% of all complaints for the period.

The Council's corporate complaints system does not record whether the
police/solicitors/courts were involved in dealing with specific
complaints. In order to establish how many of the 947 complaints involved
the police/solicitors/courts, we would be required to look through each
individual complaint file. Even based on a very conservative estimate of
20 minutes to trace each complaint, retrieve the relevant file (which are
held by individual complaints officers across the Council) and establish
police/solicitor/court involvement, this task would take in excess
of several days.

Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 recognises that a public
authority is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the
process of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit * as set by the
Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees
Charges) Regulations 2004 this is 18 hours. For requests which will exceed
18 hours to administer, by which is meant:

(a) determining whether it holds the information,

(b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the
information,

(c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the
information, and

(d) extracting the information from a document containing it,

the authority may refuse the request or levy a charge at £25 per hour for
staff time.

Having considered the amount of information which has been requested and
the staff time which would be taken up in complying with this part of your
request, we have taken the decision that we will refuse it under Section
12 (1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 as exceeding the appropriate
limit.

As you may have been unaware of the extent and scope of the information
you were requesting, we are happy to explore whether there are smaller
amounts of information which can be supplied. Can you contact me initially
to discuss how we can take this forward.

If you are unhappy with the response to your request, you may ask for an
internal review. Please contact the Council*s Head of Audit, Risk and
Information, Mr Jeff Wring at the Guildhall, High St, Bath BA1 5AW
[1]mailto:[email address].

If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you have
the right to appeal directly to the Information Commissioner for a
decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at Wycliffe House,
Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
[2]www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk.

Amanda Osborne, Information Compliance Manager
Audit, Risk and Information Service
Bath & North East Somerset Council
Telephone: 01225 396872
Facsimile: 01225 477387
[3]www.bathnes.gov.uk

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