LG Act 1974 Part III Section 32(3) notices

Dear Sir or Madam,

Over the last five years

(1) How many Local Government Act Part III Section 32(3) notices
has your council served on a Local Government Ombudsman.

(3) How many times has the Ombudsman concerned found the council
guilty of maladministration for misusing a Section 32(3) notice.

Yours faithfully,

Trevor R Nunn

Dear Sir or Madam,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of
Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Halton Borough
Council's handling of my FOI request 'LG Act 1974 Part III Section
32(3) notices'.

There is no need to search all complaint files. Said notices are
statutory notices and as such your legal department will have a
record of how many they have served on the LGO. Unless you are
suggesting that your legal department do not keep records of the
statutory notices they serve on organisations and citizens.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is
available on the Internet at this address:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/lg...

Yours faithfully,

Trevor R Nunn

Dear Halton Borough Council,

You have failed to respond to my request for an internal review in
a timely fashion or at the very least given me an explanation for
any delay. If I do not get a response within the next ten days I
will submit a complaint to the ICO.

Yours faithfully,

Trevor R Nunn

Dear Halton Direct Link,

I used the What Do They Know website to submit my request so a full
chronology can be found on line here

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/lg...

In addition
------------------------------------------------
my request was submitted on the the 11th October 2009.

Over the last five years

(1) How many Local Government Act Part III Section 32(3) notices
has your council served on a Local Government Ombudsman.

(3) How many times has the Ombudsman concerned found the council
guilty of maladministration for misusing a Section 32(3) notice.

------------------------------------------------
You acknowledged this on the 12 October 2009

Dear Mr Nunn

Thank you for your FOI enquiry. The enquiry has been logged on our
FOI tracking system and is being dealt with.

The case number is shown in the subject line of the e-mail.

Should you have any further queries please quote this reference
number.

Please use [email address] for any further correspondence.

Thank You

Halton Direct Link.

Sent By UserID: 70

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You provided a response on the 2nd November 2009

Thank you for your recent Freedom of Information request. The
Council does not keep electronic information of the Ombudsman
complaints. Individual files are kept for each complaint. On
average the Council receives approximately 25 complaints per year.
To retrieve the information you have requested would mean an
officer going through all the individual files which in total could
be in excess of 125 files.

Section 12 of the FOIA provides an exemption from a public
authority's obligation to comply with a request for information
where the cost of compliance is estimated to exceed the appropriate
limit. The appropriate limit is the key concept concerning fees.
The Fees regulations state that this is £450 for a public
authority.

In estimating whether complying with a request would exceed the
appropriate limit, Regulation 4 (3) states that an authority can
only take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in:

* determining whether it holds the information;

* locating the information, or a document containing it;

* retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and

* extracting the information from a document containing it.

The four activities are sequential, covering the retrieval process
of the information from the public authority's information store.

An authority can take into account the costs attributable to the
time that persons (both the authority's staff and external
contractors) are expected to spend on these activities. Such costs
are calculated at £25 per hour per person for all authorities
regardless of the actual cost or rate of pay, which means that the
limit will be exceeded if these activities exceed 18 hours for
local authorities. To gather the information requested an officer
would have to retrieve all the individual ombudsman files and
extract information from individual letters. As there are
potentially in excess of 125 files covering the past 5 years the
Council believes that this will take in excess of 18 hours and
therefore would cost in excess of £450 to gather.

Without undertaking a review of all the files the Council can not
be specific about the number of notices it has served under 32 (3)
in the past five years. That said the Council has served notices on
a small number of occasions normally when there is information
about a third party. The Council would estimate that it has served
less than 10 notices in the past five years. The Ombudsman has
never found the Council guilty of misusing the 32 (3) notice. If
you are dissatisfied with the Council's response you may wish to
discuss this further with the Information Commissioner's Office

-----------------------------------------------
I submitted a request for an internal review on the 2nd November
2009

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of
Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Halton Borough
Council's handling of my FOI request 'LG Act 1974 Part III Section
32(3) notices'.

There is no need to search all complaint files. Said notices are
statutory notices and as such your legal department will have a
record of how many they have served on the LGO. Unless you are
suggesting that your legal department do not keep records of the
statutory notices they serve on organisations and citizens.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is
available on the Internet at this address:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/lg...

--------------------------------------------------
On the 27th January having had no response to my request for an
internal review I sent a reminder

You have failed to respond to my request for an internal review in
a timely fashion or at the very least given me an explanation for
any delay. If I do not get a response within the next ten days I
will submit a complaint to the ICO.

------------------------------------------------
On the 28th January 2009 I received your latest response

Can you please provide us with some more information about the
original query so that we can trace it.
If possible we require the date that the request was sent, the
nature of the request and a reference number beginning with
APP20.... Which you would have received when we confirmed that the
request had been placed
on the FOI tracking system.

Thanking you for your help in this matter.

-----------------------------------------------
This is a full chronology of events regarding this FOI request.

Trevor R Nunn