Dear Information Commissioner's Office,

I have been in contact with your organisations helpline on a number of occasions to request information regarding your complaints policy,i.e. the policy which governs how you will record and address complaints from members of the public made in respect to ICO staff.

The resulting replies have been singularly uninformative.

Staff have directed me to your website here https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/comp... where it states

"We will acknowledge your complaint within 10 working days. In most cases, the person who dealt with you will first check to see if they can resolve your complaint by providing you with further information or clarification about any decisions they have reached. If they can't do that, they will share your complaint with an appropriate manager, who will look at what we have done and why.

Once a manager has considered your complaint, they will tell you what they have decided. The manager should reply within 30 calendar days of the complaint being raised with them."

It gives no details regarding the procedure being followed or any timescales for the relevant activities i.e. the "person" that you made the complaint about apparently has 10 days to acknowledge the complaint about themselves in writing, they then have an unspecified amount of time in which to change or amend any record and basically do whatever they like to cover up their actions if they wish before they decide to let a manager know about the complaint.

The manager is then given a further 30 days, calendar or working is unspecified however my guess is working, so 2 weeks for the subject of the complaint to simply acknowledge it, 6 weeks for a manager to consider it and an unspecified number of weeks between for the person complained about to let it sit if they feel like it.

So a minimum of 8 weeks and a maximum of as long as it takes to address a complaint regarding a member of staff under a process that allows the very member of staff subject to the complaint to look into their own actions.

I believe this so called process is in breach of your published code of conduct.

I made a formal complaint to the ICO on the 26 September 2019 regarding two members of staff who's actions I believe constituted a deliberate attempt to pervert the course of justice.

Their actions also appear to breach the ICO's code of conduct here https://ico.org.uk/media/about-the-ico/p...

I received the automated acknowledgement of receipt for the email but despite 13 working days elapsing, and a telephone call to the ICO asking what is happening regarding my complaint I have received no acknowledgement whilst the person complained about informed me that my complaint has not even been recorded on any system.

Please therefore provide the policy or procedure which clearly details the "complaints about ico staff" staff policy and please specify why this document is not part of your publication scheme here https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/our-inf...

Please also provide any documentation or records which show any decision making process regarding the current procedure of allowing the member of staff who is the subject of a formal complaint, to be the initial investigator and responder to any complaint about themselves without oversight.

Please also include any information which would identify this process as not being a gross conflict of interests under your code of conduct policy as being the first investigator into your own actions must be a direct conflict.

Yours faithfully,

W Hunter