Dear Sir or Madam,

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I would like to request
some information relating to the enforcement of parking
restrictions, specifically penalty charge notices.

1. I would like to request the raw data set of parking tickets
issued in the name of the council within the last five year period
broken down by:
date, time, location, narrative of infraction, current status of
case, next status of case, transaction details (ie. date, time and
method of payments made), officer ID

2. I would also like to request any information to ‘reward’/bonus
schemes/contracts in place for your parking enforcement officers.
This is envisaged to cover the details of any systems, including
(where bonuses are paid) the amount per officer per year, for the
last five years.

Regarding part 1. ideally I would like the location unit to be
'street' but if this is not practical then under your section 16
duty to advise and assist I would expect you to contact me to
discuss how you record this geospatial data so that I may narrow my
request in a way that works for both of us.

As a supplementary, under section 16, I would also ask that you
provide some detail about the recording processes of this parking
information. E.g. What software is used? What data fields are
recorded? What other data sets it links to, etc.

If this information is held by an outside contractor then it is
your responsibility under the FOIA to obtain that information.

If it is held by another public body then please can you inform me
of this and if possible transfer the request to that public body.
My preferred format to receive this information is by electronic
means. For both parts I would like the response to be in the form
of a raw text file, tab delimited, with text qualifiers where
required.

If you need any clarification of this request or if it is too broad
in any way please feel free to email me. If some parts of this
request
are more difficult to answer than others please release the
answerable material as it is available rather than hold up the
entire request for the contested data.

If FOI requests of a similar nature have already been asked could
you please include your responses to those requests. I would be
grateful if you could confirm in writing that you have received
this request, and I look forward to hearing from you within the
20-working day statutory time period.

Yours faithfully,

Neil Houston

Thank you for your information request, which is now being processed under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
 
You can expect to receive our full response in due course.

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Dear Mr Houston,

I write in response to your recent information request.

In relation to your supplementary questions, I can confirm that the
Council uses ICPS software provided by Mouchel Business Services. The data
fields captured in respect of each PCN are as follows:

Registration no.

Make

Date/time

Location

Contravention code / description

Civil Enforcement Officer number

Pocketbook

Page no.

Tax serial no. / expiry

Destination of PCN

Observation times

Blue badge details

Doctor?

No. of wheels on footpath

All windows checked

Signs of breakdown

Loading evidence

Driver seen

Foreign registration

Parked against flow

Pay and display ticket details

Bay suspended

Q2. No reward/bonus schemes/contracts/ are in place.

Q1. I would confirm that over the past 5 years, this Council has issued
approximately 213,000 PCN's. ICPS allows us to generate reports on these
PCN's in a limited number of ways - and we are unable to generate reports
showing all of the detail you have requested. We can generate an 'all
issued' report for the period in question, and this would show the
following detail:

· PCN no.

· Date/time

· Location

· Civil Enforcement Officer number

Due to the number of PCN's involved, this report runs to over 3,500 pages.
As a file it would be too large to email to you, and if we were to print
it there would be a charge for printing costs (10p per A4 page).

We are also able to generate a second report which shows contravention
type (narrative of infraction). The size of this report would be similar
to the one referred to above.

We are unable to report on current status of case, next status of case, or
method of payment. In order to extract this information from our system we
would be required to inspect each PCN record individually, which would
take a significant amount of time in relation to 213,000 records. I should
point out that authorities are not required to comply with requests
exceeding the appropriate limit of £450 (18 hours).

We should also point out that our initial assessment is that information
around the officer number for each PCN is likely to be exempt under
section 40(3) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (Personal
Information). This is because the officer number, combined with the other
data requested, would enable individual officers to be identified. The
Council's determination is that this is likely to constitute a breach of
the fairness requirement of the first Data Protection principle.

You may wish to consider the above information and use it to help you to
refine it to a more reasonable level. (You may for example wish to
consider reducing the time frame over which you are seeking information,
and narrowing the details you are seeking in respect of each PCN).

Please get in touch with me in the first instance in order to discuss how
best to proceed with your request. If you decide not to refine your
request please let me know.

Regards,

Amanda Osborne, Information Compliance Manager

Risk and Assurance Services

Bath & North East Somerset Council

Telephone: 01225 396872

Facsimile: 01225 477387

[1]www.bathnes.gov.uk

Making Bath & North East Somerset an even better place to live, work and
visit.

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Amanda,

Thanks for the response, regarding Part2.

For Part1.

The 'all issued' report, in conjunction with the 'issued - by type'
may suffice - on the proviso that the contravention details allow
us to link back to the original PCN (i.e as both reports contain
the PCN number).

Specifically I requested the data as a tab delimited file, though I
understand that some reports may be able to be generated into XLS
(though this would need to be spooled off by year or somewhat to
sit within the Excel limit of 65K rows).

Can you clarify that your system does not hold the status of the
PCN - whether paid/disputed etc? Nor can you provide a simple
extract (from the front, or backend of the database - holding the
requested fields - my experience is that usually the database can
have a query made on it to bring out selected rows).

Regarding the civil enforcement officer number, I understand that
most officers display this as a badger number on their uniform, and
that it is included on their tickets. I also believe that this
number is an number that is issued by the council to the officer,
and in no way relates to identifiable information regarding the
name of the officer or suchlike.

Thanks,
Neil

Dear Mr Houston,

Thank you for your email.

I will respond to each of your points in turn:

The 'all issued' report, in conjunction with the 'issued - by type' may
suffice - on the proviso that the contravention details allow us to link
back to the original PCN (i.e as both reports contain the PCN number).

I can confirm that the 'all issued' report contains the PCN number.

However the report showing contravention details is not broken down by PCN
number - this will only show the contravention code and number of tickets
issued against each code. In order to provide you with the contravention
code for each individual PCN we would be required to look at each PCN
record individually - a task which would exceed the appropriate limit of
£450/18 hours as set out under FOI legislation.

Specifically I requested the data as a tab delimited file, though I
understand that some reports may be able to be generated into XLS (though
this would need to be spooled off by year or somewhat to sit within the
Excel limit of 65K rows).

I would confirm that it is possible to generate the report a .csv file.
However as we have previously pointed out, the files are extremely large
and we are therefore unable to email them to you. A report containing data
for a period of 18 months is approximately 80mb. As previously noted, a
copying charge will apply if you require the information in hard copy.

Can you clarify that your system does not hold the status of the PCN -
whether paid/disputed etc?

Our system holds this data but is not able to produce a report showing
this information. We would be required to look at each PCN individually to
extract this information, and again this is a task which would exceed the
FOI appropriate limit.

Nor can you provide a simple extract (from the front, or backend of the
database - holding the requested fields - my experience is that usually
the database can have a query made on it to bring out selected rows).

Our system can produce a report showing date, time, location and PCN
number. Owing to the number of PCNs involved however, this report is still
extremely large and we are unable to email it to you as a .csv file.

Regarding the civil enforcement officer number, I understand that most
officers display this as a badger number on their uniform, and that it is
included on their tickets. I also believe that this number is an number
that is issued by the council to the officer, and in no way relates to
identifiable information regarding the name of the officer or suchlike.

I appreciate that most officers display this as a badge number on their
uniform, and that it is included on their tickets and that it should in no
way relate to identifiable information regarding the name of the
officer.  However, given the context of the rest of your request, ie your
request for time, date and location of all the PCN's in the past five
years we are concerned that the release of the officer number will,
together with this other information, allow potential identification of
the officers working in the areas identifiable from the additional
information.

I would be grateful if you would write and let me know how you wish to
proceed with your request, and in particular whether you are willing to
consider refining your request to a more reasonable level.

Regards,

Amanda Osborne, Information Compliance Manager

Risk and Assurance Services

Bath & North East Somerset Council

Telephone: 01225 396872

Facsimile: 01225 477387

www.bathnes.gov.uk

Making Bath & North East Somerset an even better place to live, work and
visit.

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

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Amanda,

Thanks for confirming what information you are able to provide, by
using the 'front end reporting' features of the system you use to
record PCN details.

I would just like to clarify - is it possible that the IT/database
administrator can produce the selected field extract from the
database backend (In my experience, databases often sit on MySQL/MS
SQL/Oracle backends - and the IT/database Administrator of the
system can often extract out information that the systems
'reporting' options don't allow).

If the size of the data extract is too large for it to be
compressed (zipped) and emailed, then I am happy to provide you
with FTP details (the IT contact could transfer the files), or to
receive the data on a CD/DVD. I understand that to produce some
reports in a 'paper' format is not the best for either of us.

Sizewise, the physical number of records will be no issue for me; I
cannot narrow down the request anymore than it already is. (That
being a limited number of fields, by PCN issued, for the 5 year
period).

Obviously if some of the information is not held in the database
(perhaps regarding the payment status etc,) then I would not want
to trouble you by having someone to review the actual case records
(as I understand this would be above and beyond the £450/2.5 day
limit)

Regarding the CEO numbers, I can note that a precedent has been set
regarding these matters. Birmingham City Council disclosed the
equivalent granularity of information, and I am sure they would
have had informal discussions with the ICO if they believed a
breach of DPA would have occurred.

Thanks,
Neil

Dear Mr Houston,

Thank you for your email.

We have spoken with our software providers, and it will be possible for us to FTP the information, so long as you are prepared to provide us with your FTP details.

You may wish to use a separate email address for this purpose, unless you are happy for these details to appear on the What Do They Know website.

Our determination that the CEO numbers are exempt still stands - you will be able to appeal this if you are unhappy with our final response.

Regards,

Amanda Osborne, Information Compliance Manager
Risk and Assurance Services
Bath & North East Somerset Council
Telephone: 01225 396872
Facsimile: 01225 477387
www.bathnes.gov.uk
 
Making Bath & North East Somerset an even better place to live, work and visit.
 
Please consider the environment before printing this email.

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Amanda,

Thanks for that, I'll send in the details referencing the WDTK/FOI
Ref.

This will contain some FTP details you/your team can use.

Thanks,

Neil

Dear Mr Houston,

I have responded to your request in full, to the email address you supplied to me on 13 August 2009.

Regards,

Amanda Osborne, Information Compliance Manager
Risk and Assurance Services
Bath & North East Somerset Council
Telephone: 01225 396872
Facsimile: 01225 477387
www.bathnes.gov.uk
 
Making Bath & North East Somerset an even better place to live, work and visit.
 
Please consider the environment before printing this email.

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