Dear Shropshire Council,

Following a realization that bullying in Cheshire East is about six times higher than in Cheshire West and Chester and having seen accusations of a culture of bullying in the former on the internet, combined with my own experiences of bullying in Cheshire County Council's Public Rights of Way unit and my own efforts to withstand that bullying (display of ID card of ex-employee in manager's office with picture of cow replacing her ID photo ([name removed]) or "anyone thinking of complaining yaboo to you" by [name removed] once complaints of bullying had been made) and the evidence of bullies in Employment Tribunal (which chopped and changed), this FOI request is being made to provide a comparison with Cheshire East to prove statistically in relation with other councils. It is also being made to make the public at large and in each authority aware of which councils are the worst offenders or the better examples. All councils have very similar anti-bullying / dignity at work policies, to which, from the results already in, they seem to stick to varying degrees. For example, the first non-Cheshire authority to reply, Kent County Council, shows 60 complaints against Cheshire East's 62, with both having 18 upheld in favour of the complainant. However, Kent's population is around 5 times greater than Cheshire East's. Also, Cheshire East replied to this FOI Act request 8 days late with no communication between the deadline and the 8 days after, whereas Kent replied 11 days after the request was made.

1) How many employees of your authority have
made an
official complaint of harassment and bullying at work since the 1st April 2009?

2) How many of these complaints were upheld in favour of the
complainant?

3) How many of those which were not upheld in favour of the
complainant went on to Appeal?

4) How many of those that went to Appeal were found to favour the
complainant?

5) How many complaints went on to an Employment Tribunal?

6) How many of these were found to uphold the complaint?

7) Out of how many of those allegations (the number given to question 1) did the complainant of
bullying claim that the bullies were telling lies?

8) How many staff does your authority have and what is the current population within your authority's area?

Yours faithfully

Mr Lewis
yabootoyou

Dear Shropshire Council,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Shropshire Council's handling of my FOI request 'Bullying in Shropshire Council'.

Please note that since my request and your reply of the 29th October 2015 from your Information Governance Team, I have not had a reply to my FOI request.

You are therefore out of time and I wish to challenge you on this.

If you could see your way to providing the information in my FOI
request ASAP I would be grateful, as I am ready to publish the
table of results, send it to the press and put it on the internet
and I wish to provide the average figures for all councils as well
as the figures for individual councils. This requires your
figures.

You are now aware that your late reply is holding this up.
Providing this would not take away the fact that you are already
late and this complaint.

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

Yours faithfully,

Mr Lewis
Yabootoyou

Dear FOI,

I do wish to go to review as I feel you could have, at the stage of providing the information, provided a reason for the delay. The only way of me getting an explanation, which I feel is fully merited and I personally would have openly provided it at the time of apologizing, is to go to review.

On a positive note for you, I will point out that you have a very low level of bullying compared with other councils and a high rate of belief in the complainant, when compared with other councils, for example your neighbours in Cheshire, which is down there with the worst. Shame you will not be on the graph as your figures only go back to 2010 and I am putting on the graph those with full responses back to 2009. You would probably have been the best, beating Somerset (where I moved from to go to Cheshire). Regretfully. But that's of no interest to you, I'm sure.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Lewis

Yabootoyou

Dear Information.Request,

I would like to add the following question to my request.

Q9) Out of the number in the response to question 1, how many of
the complainants said that they had been called "a loner"?

Yours sincerely,

Mr Lewis

Yabootoyou