consultation responses to Lyndale School closure consultation

The request was refused by Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council.

ScarletPimpernel

Dear Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council,

Wirral Council ran a consultation on various options about Lyndale School (including closure) which finished last week.

Please could you provide:

a) the number of responses to the consultation (split by type eg email, written response etc),

b) the responses to the consultation.

If answering (b) would take this FOI request over the 18.5 hour limit I am happy to instead receive just a representative sample of responses as I'm sure many will be variations on the same themes.

Yours faithfully,

John Brace

InfoMgr, FinDMT, Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council

Good Afternoon

 

Thank you for your request.  Wirral Council can confirm that the requested
information will be made available and published during September 2014. 
Therefore the Council is refusing your request, as the information
requested is determined for future publication.  In refusing your request
the Council considers that the exemption contained in Section 22 of the
FOI Act 2000, applies to your request for information.  This is
information currently held in Draft form and held by the Authority, with a
view to its publication at some future date, as a final report.

 

The information was already held with a view to such publication at the
time your request for information was made and it is reasonable in all the
circumstances that the information in Draft form should be withheld from
disclosure until the date determined for future publication.  Further
information relating to this exemption is given below.

[1]http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000...

 

Section 22 is a qualified exemption and in considering the Public Interest
Test the Council believes that all the information/responses for the
consultation require collating and then they are published as a complete
article.

The Council does not want to release partial information at this time and
then have to amend its response.

 

You have the right under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000
to ask for an internal review of the refusal of the information
requested.  Please direct any request for an internal review to
[2][Wirral Borough Council request email] and your request will be allocated for
review.

 

You do also have the right to complain to the information Commissioner, if
you are dissatisfied with the outcome of any internal review, whose office
is situated at:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire SK9 5AF

Tel: 08456 30 60 60 or 01625 54 57 45

Fax: 01625 524510 [3]www.ico.gov.uk <[4]http://www.ico.gov.uk/>

 

Kind Regards

 

Tracy O'Hare

Information Management

Transformation and Resources

Wirral Council

 

This information supplied to you is copyrighted and continues to  be
protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. You are free  to
use it for your own purposes, including any non commercial research  you
are doing and for the purposes of news reporting. Any other reuse, for 
example commercial publication, would require our specific permission, 
may involve licensing and the application of a charge.

 

 

 

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ScarletPimpernel

Dear Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council's handling of my FOI request 'consultation responses to Lyndale School closure consultation'.

Thank you for your response.

In relation to part a) of the request the number of responses to the consultation was already made available to the public in July 2014 by Cllr Tony Smith when a councillor asked a question of Cllr Tony Smith at the full Council meeting on July 14th. Therefore as this information has already been made available to the public, I do not understand why the total number of responses to the consultation cannot be provided in response to this request.

You state "Wirral Council can confirm that the requested information will be made available and published during September 2014."

I dispute this assertion made as the month of publication would seem to be incorrect. The Cabinet meeting to discuss the outcome of the consultation is to be held on 4th September 2014 and the Council has a legal requirement to publish the information which is the subject of this request five clear days before that meeting (the latest date for publication would be the 27th August 2014). Therefore, should this not be "August 2014" instead of "September 2014"?

A section 22 exemption is also subject to a public interest test, which either has not been done or it is unclear which parts of the Council's response comprise applying the public interest test. Certainly there is a public interest in providing all the consultation responses to this request and giving sufficient time for the public and councillors to have sufficient time to read and take on board all ninety consultation responses (some of which are very lengthy with one at over thirty pages long) rather than in the seven days before the Cabinet meeting.

The response states "The Council does not want to release partial information at this time and then have to amend its response."

The consultation finished in the last week of June 2014. Therefore the consultation responses between now and when the Cabinet papers are published in August won't be any different as the consultation has ended. So I don't understand why the Council thinks that releasing information now would lead to the need to amend a response at a later date?

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

Yours faithfully,

John Brace

Corrin, Jane, Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council

Good Afternoon,

Thank you for your email requesting an Internal Review.

 

When the Council makes any Consultation Papers available to the public, we
have to ensure that we are complying with The Data Protection Act 1998. 
This often means the Council has to redact names of individuals so as not
to identify them.  Therefore it is our assertion that any consultation
papers which were to be made public would be amended as stated to ensure
compliance with The Data Protection Act.  The Council therefore upholds
the Section 22 exemption as being correctly applied.

 

Thank you for bringing to our attention that the month of September was
incorrectly specified.

Kind Regards

Jane Corrin

Information and Central Services Manager

Transformation and Resources

Wirral Council

 

 

 

 

 

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