Dear Sir or Madam,

According to the Statutory Code of Practice for Freedom of
Information, each public authority should publish its target times
for determining complaints and information as to how successful it
is with meeting those targets.

I have been unable to find either of these on your website. In
fact, in the A-Z directory of services, there are links to webpages
on FOI for East Sussex, Lewes, and Eastbourne Councils, but,
surprisingly, none for Rother.

Can you please either direct me to where this information has
already been published, or else release, for each quarter since FOI
has been in place, details on what the target time for complaint
handling was, how many complaints were received in the period, and
what time was achieved for handling those.

Thank you,

Richard

Dear Sir or Madam,

Your response to this request is now overdue. Please advise.

Yours sincerely,

Richard

I am now out of the office - I hope to be back Monday 1 September.

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Dear Mr Jackson
It appears that your request was overlooked at the time of receipt. I
will record your request today and will speak with Mr Edwards next week
when he returns from leave. I apologise for any inconvenience.

Lynda Crawford
Admin Assistant
www.rother.gov.uk

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Dear Lynda Crawford,

Please take this as a formal complaint and request for internal
review in relation to my ignored request.

I fail to understand why it matters in the slightest that a single
member of staff is on leave, when the information that I requested
is information that the Council is required to publish and should
easily have to hand.

Yours sincerely,

Richard

Dear Mr Jackson

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION 2000

With reference to your request for information about our complaint
handling procedure and your subsequent complaint, I would comment as
follows.

This is a comparatively small authority and it would be difficult to
operate the sort of multi-layered complaints system that could be set up
by a much larger authority such as a County or Unitary. With any
complaint system, the main objective is to ensure that complaints are
dealt with by someone separate from the original decision-maker. The
Council has a Council-wide complaints system, and complaints about
Freedom of Information are processed under that procedure. Accordingly,
the section 45 Code of Practice may not be followed to the letter, but a
robust complaints system is in operation. This is detailed on our
website; please see http://www.rother.gov.uk/index.cfm?artic...

In relation to response times this says: "The Council will normally
reply to your complaint within 10 working days".

Our Freedom of Information tracking system records complaints made, but
as complaints are forwarded to another system they are not further
tracked as Freedom of Information complaints. Production of quarterly
statistics would not be meaningful, because we have only received ten
complaints. The following table gives their FOI reference number and the
date of the complaint. I believe that these complaints were, in the
main, resolved satisfactorily; I am not aware of any having been
referred on to the Information Commissioner.

FOI No # ComplaintReceived

51 20/05/2005
99 18/11/2005
149 07/06/2006
154 14/07/2006
204 01/12/2006
360 18/04/2008
373 31/07/2008
405 23/07/2008
407 23/07/2008
430 02/09/2008

In the circumstances, as we have provided what information we can, I
invite you to withdraw your complaint.

David Edwards
Interin Solicitor
www.rother.gov.uk
<http://www.rother.gov.uk/>

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Dear Lynda/David,

Thank you for eventually providing some of the information
requested. However I do not believe your rationale is valid, and I
decline to withdraw my complaint and request for internal review.

Yours sincerely,

Richard

Dear Mr Jackson,

Your complaint in respect of FOI complaint handling information has been
passed onto me. I have looked into this matter as requested by you.
Firstly I must apologise once again that your original request for
information was missed, this was a genuine oversight. I believe that
all the information that we had available for FOI complaints was
forwarded to you as requested. I have looked at the way that we handle
FOI complaints and have asked for some improvements to the system in
order that we are more readily able to extract the information that we
need in the future.

I hope that this answers your complaint.

Yours sincerely

Suzanne Grisbrook

Head of Corporate Services

Rother District Council

Town Hall

Bexhill-on-Sea

East Sussex

TN39 3JX

Tel: 01424 787716

E-mail: [email address]

www.rother.gov.uk

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