Dear Carol Declan

Oxford City Council – Reference: 11397

Thank you for your email below.  Your request was received on 22 August
2022 and we will endeavour to send you a response within 20 working days
(of receipt) in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000/
Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR), subject to the
information not being exempt or containing reference to a third party.

Due to an unprecedented volume of Freedom of Information Requests
currently, it is likely however that some requests may go beyond the 20
working days. We are working as hard as possible to respond in a timely
manner, but we feel it is better to keep requestors informed in advance.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information Team | Law and Governance | SAC 3.8 | Oxford City
Council | St Aldates Chambers | 109-113 St. Aldate's | Oxford | OX1 1DS 

Website: www.oxford.gov.uk | Follow us on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/OxfordCity | Like us on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/OxfordCityCouncil

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Dear Carol Declan,

Re: Freedom of Information Request, Oxford City Council – Reference: 11397

Further to the acknowledgement below, I can respond to your Freedom of
Information Act 2000 request received on 22^nd August as follows (please
note, I have also attached my full response as a PDF, since I am aware
that What Do They Know displays correspondence in plain text, and I wanted
to ensure that none of the included hyperlinks were lost):

Your Request:

Please provide all documents, minutes from meetings and internal
communications relating to the pledging of support by Oxford City Council
for the Ukraine, e.g., flying of Ukrainian flags above Council buildings
and footers on official emails showing support for the Ukraine.

Is it mandatory or optional for Council employees to put a Ukrainian flag
showing support for the Ukraine on the footer of their official Council
emails?

Has Oxford City Council ever issued a statement condemning the killing of
innocent civilians in Palestine or Yemen? Has Oxford City Council ever
discussed flying Palestinian or Yemini flags above Council buildings in
support of these persecuted people?

Our Response:

Please provide all documents, minutes from meetings and internal
communications relating to the pledging of support by Oxford City Council
for the Ukraine, e.g., flying of Ukrainian flags above Council buildings
and footers on official emails showing support for the Ukraine.

Please see attached examples of emails concerning flying the Ukrainian
flag, and use of the “Oxford Stands With Ukraine” email signature banner.
In order to provide all documents, minutes from meetings, and internal
communications relating to Oxford City Council pledging support for
Ukraine (which is not limited to flag-flying and the email signature), it
would be necessary to search all staff email accounts going back to March,
as well as searching minutes of both public Committee meetings, and
private meetings from within service areas, departments and teams.  To
conduct such a search would take significantly longer than 2.5 working
days, considering the Council has around 800 employees, and following
this, all correspondence would require redaction to remove personal
details of employees, in order to satisfy the requirements of s40 of the
Freedom of Information Act. Therefore the exemption under s12 (excessive
time) of the Freedom of Information Act applies here.

Additionally, the initial decision to fly the Ukraine flag was made back
in March, by our Committee and Member Services Manager, who has since
retired, and his replacement does not have access to his email account.

Oxford’s support of Ukraine led to a decision to discontinue our twinning
agreement with the Russian city of Perm, which had been in place since
1995, following links between the cities since 1990. You can read more
about this on our website [1]here, and in the meeting minutes attached.

Is it mandatory or optional for Council employees to put a Ukrainian flag
showing support for the Ukraine on the footer of their official Council
emails?

This is entirely optional. Please see attached emails discussing the email
signature, and the excerpt from the weekly newsletter sent to all Council
employees on 8^th March.

Has Oxford City Council ever issued a statement condemning the killing of
innocent civilians in Palestine or Yemen? Has Oxford City Council ever
discussed flying Palestinian or Yemini flags above Council buildings in
support of these persecuted people?

Oxford City Council’s support for Palestine is evident from Oxford’s
twinning with the Palestinian city of Ramallah, which was agreed in 2019,
recognising a 17-year friendship link between the two cities, which has
been developed by the [2]Oxford Ramallah Friendship Association. 
Following the twinning agreement, Oxford’s Lord Mayor visited Ramallah in
March 2022. More can be read about the twinning on the Council’s website
[3]here. [4]This news article on the Council’s website announces the
twinning, and contains statements of support from the Lord Mayor, and from
some of our councillors. The decision to extend Oxford’s twinning links to
Ramallah is detailed [5]here, and the minutes of the meeting in which the
decision was made can be found [6]here.

Oxford City Council issued a decision condemning human rights violations
in Sudan in 2019, which can be viewed online [7]here. The following quote
from the decision details is especially relevant:

“This council condemns the British government for being complicit in the
violence through its cooperation with the Saudi campaign in Yemen (where
Sudanese militias are deployed) and through funding Sudanese militias
indirectly through EU border policy (the Khartoum process/Rome Declaration
2014).”

Minutes from the meeting where the decision was made are attached.  There
is only one other mention of Yemen in the Committee meeting minutes –
please see attached.

Additionally, it is worth noting that Oxford City Council has condemned
the dreadfully inhumane treatment of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Burma),
resulting in the honour of Freedom of the City bestowed on State
Counsellor of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, being revoked.  The decision to
remove this honour was made after Oxford City Council had written a letter
to Aung San Suu Kyi, urging her to speak out on the ethnic cleansing
happening in her country, and do everything in her power to stop it.  The
minutes for the meeting where this decision was made can be found [8]here.

If you disagree with any part of the response to your request, you are
entitled to ask the Council for an internal review of the decision(s)
made.  You may do this by writing to the Monitoring Officer, by either
email – [9][email address] – or by post to Monitoring Officer, Oxford
City Council, St Aldate’s Chambers, St Aldate’s, Oxford, OX1 1DS.  After
the result of the internal review, if you remain dissatisfied, you may ask
the Information Commissioner to intervene on your behalf.  You may do this
by writing to the Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe Lane,
Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.

Yours sincerely,

Freedom of Information Officer

| Freedom of Information Team | Law & Governance | Oxford City Council |
St Aldates Chambers | St Aldates | Oxford | OX1 1DS |

For any Data Protection queries please send the email directly to the
[10][email address] mailbox

[11]stands-with-ukraine-flag-shape

From: Freedom Of Information
Sent: 12 September 2022 14:54
To: '[FOI #888979 email]'
Subject: RE: Freedom of Information request - Oxford City Council's Virtue
Signalling Support for the Ukraine Ref 11397

Dear Carol Declan

Oxford City Council – Reference: 11397

Thank you for your email below.  Your request was received on 22 August
2022 and we will endeavour to send you a response within 20 working days
(of receipt) in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000/
Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR), subject to the
information not being exempt or containing reference to a third party.

Due to an unprecedented volume of Freedom of Information Requests
currently, it is likely however that some requests may go beyond the 20
working days. We are working as hard as possible to respond in a timely
manner, but we feel it is better to keep requestors informed in advance.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information Team | Law and Governance | SAC 3.8 | Oxford City
Council | St Aldates Chambers | 109-113 St. Aldate's | Oxford | OX1 1DS 

Website: [12]www.oxford.gov.uk | Follow us on Twitter:
[13]www.twitter.com/OxfordCity | Like us on Facebook:
[14]www.facebook.com/OxfordCityCouncil

dangos adrannau a ddyfynnir

Dear Carol Declan

Oxford City Council Freedom of Information reference: 11397

Thank you for your email and please accept my apologies for the delay in replying to you. I have been asked to respond to you regarding your request for a review of the Council's handling of your Freedom of Information request regarding virtue signalling for Ukraine.

I can see that you originally sent in your request on 22nd August and we provided an answer on 30 September 2022.

Having reviewed this response, I am satisfied that we have no further information available to provide to you on this matter. Furthermore, if it was still possible to access the email account of the former Committee and Member Services Manager and identify any relevant correspondence, to do so would exceed the time limit of 2.5 working days for dealing with Freedom of Information requests and therefore Section 12 exemption (excessive time) of the FOIA would apply.

This concludes my Internal Review of your Freedom of Information case. If you remain dissatisfied, you may ask the Information Commissioner to intervene on your behalf. You can do this by writing to the Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.

Yours sincerely

Information Governance Officer

Freedom of Information Team | Law and Governance | Oxford City Council | Town Hall | St Aldates | Oxford | OX1 1BX

Website: www.oxford.gov.uk | Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/OxfordCity | Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/OxfordCityCouncil

dangos adrannau a ddyfynnir

Dear Carol Declan

Oxford City Council Freedom of Information reference: 11397

Thank you for your email. I have been asked to respond to you regarding your request for a review of the Council's handling of your Freedom of information request regarding access to emails of the former Committee and Member Services Manager.

Request
You claim that it is no longer possible to access emails sent by the former Committee and Member Services Manager. I do not believe this statement. Please provide the relevant text from your Records Retention Schedule document detailing the destruction/retention of such documents.

Response
Please see below extract from our Retention Procedure regarding the email accounts of former employees:

The process for mailbox data is as follows

1. Service Desk disable the account from the day they have left.
2. the account is marked as to be deleted - known as zzz on the account
3. once deleted the mailbox is automatically removed from the system after 30 days
4. once removed there is an option to recover for up to 14 days
5. after this period there is no recovery option

The exception to this is if the service or manager asks for ICT to store the mailbox for business reasons in which case we would store a copy of the mailbox pst file offline on one of the onsite archive servers . This was not the case for this particular officer and we do not have any offline copy stored.

Our normal SCC backups are 14 days, so no data is recoverable from that source.

Therefore we can confirm that we cannot access this email account.

This concludes my Internal Review of your Freedom of Information case. If you remain dissatisfied, you may ask the Information Commissioner to intervene on your behalf.  You can do this by writing to the Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.

Yours sincerely

Information Governance Officer

Freedom of Information Team | Law and Governance | Oxford City Council | Town Hall | St Aldate’s | Oxford | OX1 1BX

Website: www.oxford.gov.uk | Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/OxfordCity | Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/OxfordCityCouncil

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