Dear Sir or Madam,

Please provide me with copies of all meeting minutes since January
1st 2008, where Freedom of Information has been discussed and
Rother District Council has been present.

Please provide minutes for both meetings internally within Rother
District Council and externally with private and/or other public
organisations.

All correspondence can be sent to this email address, as stated in
section 8 of the Freedom of Information Act.

Yours faithfully,

S Slatt

I am now out of the office - I hope to be back Monday 21 July.

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Dear Mr Slatt

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000

I refer to your request received on 15 July 2008 about Feedom of Information in Minutes.

Under section 8 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, a request for information must comply with three requirements. It must:
(a) be in writing,
(b) state the name of the applicant and an address for correspondence, and
(c) describes the information requested.
After initial consideration, this request appears to comply with requirements (a) and (c) but it does not comply with requirement (b) because you do not provide an address for correspondence. We are entitled to this even if the request is made by e-mail and you ask us for a reply by e-mail, and we are able to comply.
Under section 14 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 we are not obliged to comply with a request for information if the request is vexatious, and where we have previously complied with a request for information which was made by any person, we are not obliged to comply with a subsequent identical or substantially similar request from that person unless a reasonable interval has elapsed between compliance with the previous request and the making of the current request. The Information Commissioner has advised that a request may be regarded as vexatious if it:
* clearly does not have any serious purpose or value;
* is designed to cause disruption or annoyance;
* has the effect of harassing the public authority; or
* can otherwise fairly be characterised as obsessive or manifestly
unreasonable.
Unless we knew your real name and real address it would be more difficult for us to determine whether your request was vexatious or repeated. For instance, unless you are a professional journalist or researcher, your request would be less likely to have any serious purpose or value if you do not live in this District.
At the bottom of your e-mail you say that any reply will be published on the Internet. With reference to that, would you please note that the Act does not require us to consent to such publication and therefore, when you have supplied your address for correspondence, any response would be personal to yourself and no consent to publish it, for instance on a web site, is given. Any application for consent to re-use information will be considered under the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005, but if consent is given a charge may be made to you. Please feel free, however, to display this response on your website.
Since the coming into force of the Act we have processed over 400 separate direct requests from people who wrote letters, sent e-mails (with their name and address) to [Rother District Council request email] <mailto:[Rother District Council request email]> or used our website. In the majority of these cases we have been able to supply the information requested within the statutory time limit. We take seriously our obligation to provide advice and assistance to people who make genuine requests for information. If your request is not vexatious or repeated, then I would invite you to make your request to us direct, complying with section 8 of the Act. I assure you that having regard to the Data Protection Act 1998 we do not divulge the names or addresses of people who make requests for information.
You may use our internal complaints procedure if you are dissatisfied. If you are still dissatisfied you may appeal to the Information Commissioner. Please contact Anne Bruin, Customer Services Manager, if you wish to complain.

David Edwards
Interim Solictor
01424 787840
www.rother.gov.uk

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Dear Lynda Crawford,

Thank you for your reply dated the 23rd July 2008, but I am
confused by your statement that I have not included an address for
correspondence, as I was under the impression that an email address
would be sufficient.

I refer you to the Department of Constitutional Affairs' FOI
Procedural Guidance web page which states;

"There is no obligation to comply with a request for information if
it does not give a return address. If a request is received by
email and, although no postal address is given, the email address
of the sender is included, then this should be treated as the
return address."
http://www.dca.gov.uk/foi/guidance/progu...

As I have provided you with an email address, please use this as my
correspondence address, as previously requested.

In reference to your point about Section 14 of the Act, I can
assure you that this request is by no means vexatious in spirit,
nor is it a duplication of any request made by myself, as this is
the first FOI request I have submitted to Rother District Council.
If you consider my request to be either vexatious or a duplication,
and are therefore refusing to release the requested information,
please could you adhere to section 17 of the Act, formally
notifying me of your refusal and also state the reasons behind your
decision.

As an aside, please could you consider this email to be an
application for consent to re-use the above requested information.
If a charge needs to be made, please could you advise me on your
standard charge for re-use of information (if applicable) or the
factors that you have taken into account when calculating the
charge.

Yours sincerely,

Sam Slatt

Dear Mr Slatt
I refer to your request received on 15 July 2008 about meeting minutes regarding FOI since 1st January 2008.

It has not been established that an e-mail address is an "address for correspondence" for the purposes of section 8 (1)(b). I am awaiting guidance from the Information Commissioner.

In the meanwhile, I am concerned that treating such requests as invalid is creating a false impression about this Council, and there is no point in withholding information that is easily supplied without placing significant burdens on the Council, so we will comply with this request on a voluntary, without prejudice, basis.

Freedom of Information has not been the subject of any report to any Committee of the Council since January 2008 and there have been no officer meetings either internally or with outside bodies at which it was discussed.

You may use our internal complaints procedure if you are dissatisfied. If you are still dissatisfied you may appeal to the Information Commissioner. Please contact Anne Bruin, Team Leader - Customer Services, if you wish to complain.

Yours sincerely
David Edwards
Interim Solicitor

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Dear Mr Edwards,

Thank you very much for your reply, in particular, thank you for
replying before receiving guidance from the Commissioner.

Once you do get a reply from the Commissioner, would it be possible
for you to update me on the decision over email addresses? Or, if
the guidance is going to be posted anywhere, could you point me in
that direction?

Regards

Sam Slatt