Contact email addresses for Parish Councils

Aylesbury Vale District Council did not have the information requested.

Dear Aylesbury Vale District Council,

Please can you supply email addresses by which one may submit Freedom of Information requests to the following parish councils:

Woodham Parish Meeting
Upper Winchendon Parish Meeting
Shalstone Parish Meeting
Kingswood Parish Meeting
Hoggeston Parish Meeting
Foscote Parish Meeting
Dunton Parish Meeting
Drayton Beauchamp Parish Meeting
Dorton Parish Meeting
Chetwode Parish Meeting
Beachampton Parish Council

Thank you

Yours faithfully,

Doug Paulley

Records, Aylesbury Vale District Council

Dear Mr Paulley

Thank you for your information request received in the office hours of 28 November 2016.

We confirm receipt of your request for information and will handle it under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

You can expect to receive a response by 28 December 2016.

Kind regards

Francisca Harpur
Information & Administrative Officer
Business Strategy & Governance
Aylesbury Vale District Council
The Gateway
Gatehouse Road
Aylesbury
Bucks
HP19 8FF

Tel: 01296 585771

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Records, Aylesbury Vale District Council

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Paulley

Please find attached the response to your Freedom of Information request.

Kind regards

Francisca Harpur
Information & Administrative Officer
Business Strategy & Governance
Aylesbury Vale District Council
The Gateway
Gatehouse Road
Aylesbury
Bucks
HP19 8FF

01296 585771

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Dear Aylesbury Vale District Council,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Aylesbury Vale District Council's handling of my FOI request 'Contact email addresses for Parish Councils'.

1) To my request:

"Please supply the email address one may use to send a FOI request to each of the above "

You responded: "We do not hold a public email address"

That doesn't answer my question. Whether the email address is public or not, please provide it to me, or cite a relevant exemption that entitles you to refuse to provide it.

2) It's taken you 25 calendar days to respond to my request. I don't see why it would take so long to provide a simple response.

The primary obligation to reply to FOI requests is "promptly". The long-stop of 20 working days is a separate and additional catch-all requirement by which time it is judged that "promptly" will have passed in every case.

As the ICO state:

"The obligation to respond promptly means that an authority should comply with a request as soon as is reasonably practicable.
Whilst this is linked to the obligation to respond within 20 working days, it should be treated as a separate requirement.
An authority will therefore need to both respond promptly and within 20 working days in order to comply with section 10(1). Authorities should regard the 20 working day limit as a ‘long stop’, in other words the latest possible date on which they may issue a response.
It also follows that an authority which provides its response close to, or on, the final day of the 20 working day limit ought to be able to both account for, and justify, the length of time taken to comply with the request."

3) Your autoresponse indicates that you consider that a FOI request emailed to yourselves is only considered to be received on the next working day. This is not the case, as the ICO also make clear:

"The date of receipt will be either;
The day on which the request is physically or electronically delivered to the authority, or directly into the email inbox of a member of staff; or
if the authority has asked the requester for further details to identify and locate the requested information, the date on which the necessary clarification is received."

It says nothing about "out of hours" requests being considered to be delivered in the next working day. "The day o which the request (was) electronically delivered to teh authority ... or directly into the email inbox of a member of staff" is the day on which the email is received by your email servers, irrespective of whether it's after office hours or not, and any claim to the contrary is unhelpful at best.

Thank you

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,

Doug Paulley

Records, Aylesbury Vale District Council

Dear Mr Paulley

Thank you for your request for an Internal Review of FOI 5647 received on 22 December 2016.

Your request will be processed under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 - you can expect a response as soon as possible and no later than 24 January 2017.

Kind regards

Francisca Harpur
Information & Administrative Officer
Business Strategy & Governance
Aylesbury Vale District Council
The Gateway
Gatehouse Road
Aylesbury
Bucks
HP19 8FF

01296 585771

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Binning, Jackie, Aylesbury Vale District Council

Dear Mr Paulley

 

Further to the acknowledgement you received from my colleague, Francisca
Harpur, dated 29 December 2016. 

 

I have been advised that all of the parishes, with the exception of
Beachampton, are parish meetings only. The parishes they cover do not have
enough electors (generally less than 200) to warrant the formation of a
Parish Council with elected councillors and an employed clerk (paid or
unpaid). A correspondent to a parish meeting (where there is one) is an
individual elector within that parish who voluntarily takes on the role of
organising an annual meeting to which all parishioners are invited. A
parish meeting may have other roles and these and further information
regarding the difference between parish councils and parish meetings are
contained in Part 1, Section 13 of the Local Government Act, 1972.
[1]Local Government Act 1972

 

Any contact information for the parish meetings on AVDC’s website has been
put on with the correspondent’s permission. To supply further private
information (if known), without their permission, would be a breach of the
Data Protection Act 1998.

 

This is similar to the note on ‘Your Privacy’ on the ‘What do they Know’
website which states “We will not disclose your email address to anyone
unless we are obliged to by law, or you ask us to. This includes the
public authority that you are sending a request to.”

 

However, we are writing to the correspondents of Barton Hartshorn,
Chetwode, Dorton, Drayton Beauchamp, Dunton, Foscote, Hoggeston,
Kingswood, Shalstone and Woodham and the clerk of Beachampton Parish
Council to see if they have email addresses that they will allow us to
publish on our website. Unfortunately, there is no one that we can contact
at Upper Winchendon. Otherwise correspondence will have to be made via the
contact details already published.

 

As detailed in your acknowledgement, you will receive a response by no
later than 24 January 2017.

 

Any problems, or if you think we ought to change anything, please let me
know.

 

 

 

Kind regards

 

Jackie Binning

IT Information Governance and Support Officer

Aylesbury Vale District Council

Business Governance

The Gateway

Gatehouse Road

Aylesbury

Bucks. HP19 8FF

 

Tel: 01296 585495

Web: [2]www.aylesburyvaledc.gov.uk

 

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References

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