Dear Sir or Madam,

During the last five years how many times has the Local Government
Ombudsman (as a result of investigating a complaint against City of
York Council) brought to the attention of the council the fact that
a member of City of York Council staff had misled them, lied to
them or done anything else to hinder their investigation. If they
have what disciplinary action was taken against the individual(s)
concerned by the council.

Yours faithfully,

Trevor R Nunn

Dear Mr Nunn

Your request is refused under the cost limit.

The council's central Ombudsman complaints monitoring system only records the official decision category, e.g. “Ombudsman’s Discretion”, “No or Insufficient Evidence of Maladministration”.

On the Ombudsman's recommendation this team only keeps paperwork for 6 months from the end of the financial year during which the complaint is closed, so we can provide no further information prior to March 2007.

Any evidence of obstruction or hindrance would be reported to the Department responsible for dealing with the complaint and any disciplinary action would be dealt with at that level. This team does not receive copies of the correspondence between the department and the Ombudsman and so do not have the relevant information in the files that we do have in this section. Any disciplinary information would be held locally in Directorate Human Resources teams.

Gathering the information requested would require going through each file that this team hold and subjectively assessing whether deception, on any other form of hindrance may possibly have taken place, in each such instance the relevant team that actually investigated the complaint would then need to be contacted and their records investigated to ascertain whether the Ombudsman had brought such an incident to the department’s (and therefore CYC’s) attention. As such actions may be secondary to the actual complaint, all correspondence would need to be searched, not just that containing the details of the Ombudsman’s final decision.

In any cases when the Ombudsman did highlight such an incident the relevant HR team would need to consult the individual’s personal file to find out whether the disciplinary action upheld the Ombudsman’s findings and what the outcome was. To answer the query fully at least three separate departments will have to search any files they have in connection with each complaint.

Therefore this investigation would require more than non-skilled labour and take more than 18 hours.

Your request is therefore refused, as likely to exceed the appropriate limit as provided at Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. If you wish to complain you may do so in writing to the Director of Resources at the address below. If you are still not satisfied you may complain, again in writing, to the Information Commissioner at
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

yours sincerely
Robert Beane

Robert Beane
Information Governance Officer, City of York Council
PO Box 31, Library Square, York, YO1 7DU
01904 552933
[City of York Council request email] or [email address]

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Dear Sir or Madam,

Your assertion that you need to go through each file is nonsense.
If it had happened the monitoring officer would have been under a
statutory obligation to bring it to the attention of the council.
Therefore, they would have a record of doing so.

Therefore your suggestion that it take more than 18 hours is not
accepted.

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

I am writing to request an internal review of City of York
Council's handling of my FOI request 'LGO investigations.'.

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 sincerely,

Trevor R Nunn

dear Mr Nunn

thankyou for pointing out the legal obligation. My colleagues have confirmed that there is no record of such an event in the Chief Executive's department file, so we may deduce that there have been no complaints from the Ombudsman of the sort you describe.

yours sincerely
Robert Beane
Robert Beane
Information Governance Officer, City of York Council
PO Box 31, Library Square, York, YO1 7DU
01904 552933
[City of York Council request email] or [email address]

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