Details of PATAS adjudicators and appointment information
Dear London Councils,
Further to my recent direct freedom-of-information request in this matter of 29th July (your reference S-2013-23) please report to your FOI-DPA Complaints section my dissatisfaction with your information.
I find your responses variously incomplete, evasive and indifferent, and not justifiable. Accordingly I request a review to provide the information I requested, with an adequate response from you to this website.
REQUEST 1 I asked for a list of all the PATAS adjudicators, including the Chief Adjudicator, showing for each the date of their appointment and their legal status being either a solicitor or a barrister.
You merely referred me to the already well-known published list of adjudicators. It has proved impossible to discover in respect of some of them what their legal status is, in some cases seeming to be neither, and you have made no attempt to provide it.
In purporting to advise me the dates of their appointment you referred me to a listing of some 100 extensive London Councils’ Committee reports which, issued over nearly ten years deal with a wide range of diverse issues and where, I assume, the random dates of individual adjudicator appointments from time to time may be buried within them. That is a slovenly response to my request which I find impertinent.
Please now provide the information I requested.
REQUEST 2 With reference to the retirement of the former Chief Adjudicator Martin Wood, please advise the names and positions of the members of the Committee which interviewed/considered candidates for appointment to the replacement position of Chief Adjudicator and also provide a list of the candidates who were considered for the post.
You advised me the positions of the interview panel as being: The Chief Congestion Charging Adjudicator (Chairperson), The Corporate Director – Services of London Councils, The Director - Corporate Governance of London Councils, and The Comptroller and City Solicitor - City of London Corporation.
You refused to provide the names of these persons on the incomprehensible ground that, despite all of them being decision-making persons of substantial seniority, none of them in the holding of their titled public-facing positions would expect their names to be disclosed. I consider that refusal to be absurd and ridiculous.
Please now provide their names as requested.
Further, all of the candidates considered for the post of PATAS Chief Adjudicator will be legal professionals of a significant standing and well known within their then-current spheres so it appears inexplicable to consider that their candidacy should be a matter of privacy and be maintained a secret.
Please now provide the names of the candidates who were considered by the interview panel.
In sum, please provide me via this website with all of the information I requested without further evasion and obfuscation.
Yours faithfully,
Duncan McKenzie
Dear Mr McKenzie,
RE: FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 - INFORMATION REQUEST – REFERENCE
S-2013-23
Thank you for your email dated 17 August 2013, requesting an internal
review of your request for information which was received on 29 July 2013.
We will endeavour to respond within 20 working days, i.e. on or before 16
September 2013. However, if the review is complex or requires wider than
usual consultation, it may be necessary to extend this deadline. If this
is the case, and your review cannot be completed in the shorter timeframe,
we will inform you of this.
If you are still not content with our response to your request for
information upon completion of our internal review, you can write to the
Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner can be contacted
at:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Yours sincerely,
John Erde
John Erde
Corporate Complaints & FOI Administrative Officer
[1][email address]
London
Councils
59½ Southwark Street
London SE1 0AL
Direct line: 020 7934 9753
[2]www.londoncouncils.gov.uk
Follow us on Twitter: @londoncouncils
London Councils represents all 32 London boroughs and the City of London.
Find out more about what we do:
[3]Policy and lobbying | [4]Events | [5]Services
Dear Mr McKenzie
I am currently undertaking an internal review of your FOI request from 29 July and the reply you were sent by London Councils on 6 August.
I will get back to you in due time with the results of the review.
Kind regards, Ana
Ana Gradiska
Acting FOI and Complaints Manager
London Councils
59 ½ Southwark Street
London SE1 0AL
Direct line: 020 7934 9781
www.londoncouncils.gov.uk
Follow us on Twitter @londoncouncils
London Councils represents all 32 London boroughs and the City of London Councils
Find out more about what we do:
Policy and lobbying | Events | Services
Dear Mr McKenzie
Please find attached my internal review in to the London Councils response to your FOI request regarding PATAS adjudicators.
Kind regards,
Ana Gradiska
Acting FOI and Complaints Manager
Dear Mr McKenzie,
I have been informed by the ICO that you would prefer that we send
correspondence to you through this email address. Therefore please see
below a copy of the email which we sent to your email address last week. I
sent the email to your other email address because this is the one that we
have listed on our database, since you used the address to make the FOI
request in the first instance.
Yours sincerely,
John Erde
From: FOI-DPA Complaints
Sent: 11 February 2014 15:42
To:
Subject: Information request reference S-2013-23
Dear Mr McKenzie
I am writing with regards to your request for information, reference
S-2013-23, which you originally made to London Councils on 29 July 2013.
The Information Commissioner is currently investigating the way in which
London Councils handled this request.
We have reconsidered the way in which we handled this request and have
decided that we are able to release some of the information which we
previously withheld. I have attached to this email a list of the names of
the PATAS adjudicators stating whether each individual is a solicitor or
barrister. I have also attached a list with the names and positions of the
individuals who interviewed and considered candidates for the position of
Chief Adjudicator in 2010.
We previously withheld this information because we considered that release
of this personal data would constitute a breach of the first data
principle in the Data Protection Act 1998 (the DPA) and that, therefore,
the information was exempt from release by virtue of section 40(2) of the
Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the FOIA). Upon reconsideration, we have
concluded that the public disclosure of this information would not in fact
breach the first data protection principle. We apologise for this mistake,
and for the now considerable time it has taken to provide you with this
information. London Councils is committed to openness, transparency and
freedom of information, and we try to balance this commitment with our
duty to protect the right to privacy of the individuals about whom we hold
information. In this case we made a mistake in the way we struck this
balance. We have learnt from this experience and hopefully will be in a
better position to deal with requests for third party personal data in the
future.
However, we still consider that the names of the individuals who were
considered for the position of Chief Adjudicator in 2010 are exempt from
disclosure under section 40(2) of the FOIA. We believe that the release of
this information would breach the first data principle in the DPA.
We will write to the ICO, forwarding on a copy of this email and
explaining the information that we have released and the information that
we are still withholding.
Yours sincerely
John Erde
John Erde
Corporate Complaints & FOI Officer
[1][email address]
London
Councils
59½ Southwark Street
London SE1 0AL
Direct line: 020 7934 9753
[2]www.londoncouncils.gov.uk
Follow us on Twitter: @londoncouncils
London Councils represents all 32 London boroughs and the City of London.
Find out more about what we do:
[3]Policy and lobbying | [4]Events | [5]Services
References
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Peter Harry left an annotation ()
So how do we know that those that are named as adjudicators, are Solicitors, Barristers tea, coffee makers or dish-washers?
Transparency is definitely not the order of the day.