Waste and recycling collection dates

The request was successful.

Dear Herefordshire Council,

Please provide the following data, under FOI:

1) Waste and recycling schedules for all properties, organised by address and postcode. Please include day of the week and collection frequency (weekly, fortnightly etc) for each service type. I request that all data is provided in CSV format, ideally with separate columns for the different parts of the address. A link to a web service does not meet my requirements, though the source data for a web service may. Please include the UPRN for each property if held. This is now permitted by the AddressBase licence. See https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/n... for details.
For an example of a suitable spreadsheet, see here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...
Variants are acceptable if they contain the requested data. Separate spreadsheets for each waste or recycling type are also fine.
2) For collections that are not weekly, details of how to work out which week a collection will be. For example, if a "Week 1/week 2" system is used, then please provide an example of a date in week 1 and a date in week 2. For example "2nd January 2017 was in Recycling Week 1"
3) Details of all alterations to regular schedules for bank holidays etc. Please provide this for all future dates in 2017 and 2018. For example, see this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...
4) Details of any planned changes to these schedules.

Please also treat this as a request for re-use of the dataset under RPSI. Please can you grant permission for reuse, ideally under the Open Government Licence. My planned use is to transform the data into a standard format, and aggregate it with the data from other authorities. I will then release it under an open licence to enable the development of useful services to encourage recycling, such as chatbots and voice tools to find upcoming recycling days.

Yours faithfully,

Matt Kane

Jaques, Bethan, Herefordshire Council

1 Attachment

Good morning,

 

Please see attached acknowledgement for your Freedom of Information
request.

 

Regards

 

Bethan

 

Bethan Jaques

Information Access officer

01432 260535

 

 

“Any opinion expressed in this e-mail or any attached files are those of
the individual and not necessarily those of Herefordshire Council,
Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS Trust or
2gether NHS Foundation Trust. You should be aware that Herefordshire
Council, Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS
Trust & 2gether NHS Foundation Trust monitors its email service. This
e-mail and any attached files are confidential and intended solely for the
use of the addressee. This communication may contain material protected by
law from being passed on. If you are not the intended recipient and have
received this e-mail in error, you are advised that any use,
dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error please contact the
sender immediately and destroy all copies of it.”

Jaques, Bethan, Herefordshire Council

1 Attachment

Good afternoon,

 

Please see attached response for your Freedom of Information request.

 

Regards

 

Bethan

 

Bethan Jaques

Information Access Officer

01432 260535

 

 

“Any opinion expressed in this e-mail or any attached files are those of
the individual and not necessarily those of Herefordshire Council,
Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS Trust or
2gether NHS Foundation Trust. You should be aware that Herefordshire
Council, Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS
Trust & 2gether NHS Foundation Trust monitors its email service. This
e-mail and any attached files are confidential and intended solely for the
use of the addressee. This communication may contain material protected by
law from being passed on. If you are not the intended recipient and have
received this e-mail in error, you are advised that any use,
dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error please contact the
sender immediately and destroy all copies of it.”

Dear Herefordshire Council,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Herefordshire Council's handling of my FOI request 'Waste and recycling collection dates'.

I believe that Section 43 has been incorrectly engaged. There is no reasonable way to believe that simply providing collection day information would reveal proprietary routing information. I am not asking for route or crew details. I am not asking for any more data than is available on the authority website when searching for individual property details. While this is not reasonably available for the purposes of section 21 FOIA because it would be prohibitively time-consuming to query thousands of individual properties, it nevertheless means that the data is available outside a narrow circle and thus the likelihood for harm is limited. If the information were genuinely valuable to competitors bidding for contracts, they could devote the resources to querying individual streets to gather enough information to find out collection days.

No information was provided about what evidence the contractor had offered to demonstrate why providing collection day data in a machine readable form will harm its commercial interests but making it available on the authority's website as a web service will not.

I also believe that the public interest test has been incorrectly performed. No consideration was given to the public benefit of having easily available waste collection day information in an open form, rather than restricted to the authority's website. Free services such as chat bots and voice services help encourage recycling, benefiting the environment and saving public money.

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

Yours faithfully,

Matt Kane

Jaques, Bethan, Herefordshire Council

1 Attachment

Good afternoon,

 

Please see attached letter in relation to your Freedom of Information
request.

 

Regards

 

Bethan

 

Bethan Jaques

Information Access Officer

01432 260535

 

 

“Any opinion expressed in this e-mail or any attached files are those of
the individual and not necessarily those of Herefordshire Council,
Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS Trust or
2gether NHS Foundation Trust. You should be aware that Herefordshire
Council, Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS
Trust & 2gether NHS Foundation Trust monitors its email service. This
e-mail and any attached files are confidential and intended solely for the
use of the addressee. This communication may contain material protected by
law from being passed on. If you are not the intended recipient and have
received this e-mail in error, you are advised that any use,
dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error please contact the
sender immediately and destroy all copies of it.”

Jaques, Bethan, Herefordshire Council

1 Attachment

Good afternoon,

 

Please see attached letter.

 

Regards

 

Bethan

 

Bethan Jaques

Information Access Officer

Plough lane

01432 261916

 

 

“Any opinion expressed in this e-mail or any attached files are those of
the individual and not necessarily those of Herefordshire Council,
Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS Trust or
2gether NHS Foundation Trust. You should be aware that Herefordshire
Council, Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS
Trust & 2gether NHS Foundation Trust monitors its email service. This
e-mail and any attached files are confidential and intended solely for the
use of the addressee. This communication may contain material protected by
law from being passed on. If you are not the intended recipient and have
received this e-mail in error, you are advised that any use,
dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error please contact the
sender immediately and destroy all copies of it.”

Access To Information, Herefordshire Council

2 Attachments

Dear Mr Kane

 

Please find attached a response to your request for a review of your FOI.

 

Kind regards

 

Helen Worth

Senior Information Governance Officer

Information Governance

Herefordshire Council

Tel 01432 260497

 

“Any opinion expressed in this e-mail or any attached files are those of
the individual and not necessarily those of Herefordshire Council,
Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS Trust or
2gether NHS Foundation Trust. You should be aware that Herefordshire
Council, Herefordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (HCCG), Wye Valley NHS
Trust & 2gether NHS Foundation Trust monitors its email service. This
e-mail and any attached files are confidential and intended solely for the
use of the addressee. This communication may contain material protected by
law from being passed on. If you are not the intended recipient and have
received this e-mail in error, you are advised that any use,
dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this e-mail is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error please contact the
sender immediately and destroy all copies of it.”

Dear Herefordshire Council,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts reviews of requests for re-use under the Re-Use of Public Sector Information Regulations.

I am writing to request an internal review of Herefordshire Council's handling of my RPSI request 'Waste and recycling collection dates'.

I made a request for re-use of waste collection data, along with an FOI request for its release. No permission for re-use was granted, and section 21 was engaged as the information can be searched on the authority website.

I believe that the authority is in breach of the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations, along with Section 11 and Section 11A FOIA. The request was for a dataset, which means that the authority should have made the information available in an electronic form that is capable of re-use and released it under an open licence. A link to a web page is not capable of re-use. I also believe that Section 21 FOIA was incorrectly engaged, because obtaining the full dataset would require me to make tens of thousands of searches on the website. It would also require me to have the full list of addresses in the authority in order to make the search, which was not provided. For both of these reasons it cannot be claimed that the information is reasonably available, so section 21 should not be engaged.

A full history of my re-use request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/w...

Yours faithfully,

Matt Kane

Access To Information, Herefordshire Council

Dear Mr Kane,

Thank you for your request for a review of the council’s processing of your Freedom of Information request, which was received on 27th September 2017.

The council’s review procedure states that the review will be undertaken by a panel of officers who were not involved in the original decision. The reviewing panel will make a fresh decision based on all available evidence at the date of your request, and will consider the validity of any exemptions applied and whether the council complied with its statutory duties.
A response will be provided by 25th October 2017.

If, for any reason, it becomes necessary to extend this deadline you will be informed of the reasons for this, and advised of a new timescale for a response.

We will now investigate this matter and once we have considered the issues involved, will write to you with the outcome of our review and provide you with a full explanation.

Regards

Bethan

Bethan Jaques
Information Access Officer
Plough lane
01432 261916

Access To Information, Herefordshire Council

2 Attachments

Dear Mr Kane,

Please find attached a response to your request for a further review of your Freedom of Information Request.

Kind regards
Helen

Helen Worth
Senior Information Governance Officer
Information Governance
Herefordshire Council
Tel 01432 260497