LGO investigations.

Dear Mr Nunn,

Thank you for your request for information below which has been given
reference FOI 1505. Please quote this on any correspondence regarding your
request.

Stockport Council will respond to your request within 20 working days. If
there will be a charge for disbursements e.g. photocopying in order to
provide the information, we will inform you as soon as possible to see if
you wish to proceed; however such charges are usually waived if they
amount to less than £10.

Yours sincerely,

Claire Naven

Claire Naven

Data Protection & Freedom of Information Officer

Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

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Dear Mr Nunn

Thank you for making a Freedom of Information request our ref 1505.

Unfortunately the request you made would exceed the statutory limit laid
down for Freedom of Information requests which is currently 18 hours
work. To give you an indication we have had 301 cases go to the LGO if we
presumed that each case to be reviewed would take 10 minutes the total
would be in excess of 50 hours. Please do let us know if we can provide
advice and assistance to yourself to limit your request. We do, however,
believe that it would be better to submit this request to the LGO
themselves. They can be contacted on 0845 602 1983 or by mail at:

The Local Government Ombudsman
PO Box 4771
Coventry CV4 0EH

If you are unhappy with the way we have handled your request you are
entitled to ask for an internal review. Any internal review will be
carried out by a senior member of staff who was not involved with your
original request. To ask for an internal review, contact
[email address] in the first instance or write to:

Data Protection and Freedom of Information Officer

Stockport Council - Legal Services

Town Hall

Edward Street

Stockport

SK1 3XE

If you are unhappy with the outcome of any internal review, you are
entitled to complain to the Information Commissioner. To do so, contact:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

www.ico.gov.uk

01625 545 745

Yours sincerely,

Sara Barnard

Data Protection/Freedom of Information Act Officer

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Dear Mr Nunn,

I am writing in response to your email below.

Please take this as confirmation that we have received your request for an
internal review. I will arrange for an internal review to be carried out
and will respond to you in due course.

Yours sincerely,

Claire Naven

Claire Naven

Data Protection & Freedom of Information Officer

Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

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Dear Mr Nunn,

I am writing in response to your request for an internal review below (ref
1505).

The Council's original decision has now been reviewed by Louise
Richardson, Head of Policy Unit. Please find the full review response
below:

Dear Mr Nunn,

I am writing in response to your request for an internal review of the way
your recent request for information about LGO investigations was handled
by the Council (ref FOI 1505).

I have now reviewed your request and the subsequent correspondence and can
confirm that I believe that the response was totally appropriate.

The way other local authorities have responded to your request does not
affect Stockport Council's response because each authority will record and
store the information differently. The information you requested is stored
in individual case files and is not currently recorded on an electronic
case management system; therefore it is not a case of simply running a
report to extract the requested information. Each case file would need to
be examined to determine if it held relevant information before that
information could be extracted. Contrary to your suggestion, storing the
information in this way does not mean that it is not recorded at all or
brought to the attention of appropriate individuals within the Council as
necessary.

My decision to uphold our original response has been made on the basis
that to review the number of cases (301) that your request included would
exceed the cost limit set out in the Freedom of Information Act 2000
(FOIA). As you may be aware, under section 12(1) of the FOIA public
authorities such as Stockport Council are not obliged to comply with
requests for information if they estimate that the cost of complying with
the request would exceed the `appropriate limit'. The Freedom of
Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations
2004 set an `appropriate limit' of £450 for public authorities outside
Central Government, which equates to 18 hours' work at a statutory rate of
£25 per hour. Your request was originally refused on the basis that
compliance would take in excess of 18 hours' work.

I would suggest that our original response has been conservative in its
estimation of the time required to comply and I feel that an allowance of
10 minutes per file is an appropriate minimum estimate. There are 301 case
files which, when taking the minimum estimated time per file, equates to
over 50 hours' work to determine whether we hold the relevant information
then locate, retrieve and extract it. This clearly exceeds the
`appropriate limit'; therefore I consider that the original decision to
refuse your request was correct.

If you are unhappy with the outcome of this internal review, you are
entitled to complain to the Information Commissioner. To do so, contact:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

[1]www.ico.gov.uk

01625 545 745

Yours sincerely,

Louise Richardson

Head of Policy Unit

Chief Executive's Directorate

Claire Naven

Data Protection & Freedom of Information Officer

Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

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Dear Mr Nunn,

I am writing following your complaint to the Information Commissioner's
Office (ICO) regarding your FOI request ref FOI 1505. The ICO has
completed its investigation and asked the Council to respond to you
directly.

I understand from your comments on the `What do they know?' website that
you maintain that the Council's Monitoring Officer should have the
information you requested to hand. This point was raised by the ICO during
its investigation. I understand from our investigation of your complaint
that in 2003, the Council's Monitoring Officer at that time issued
guidance about how to address cases where the Ombudsman found
maladministration on the part of the Council; it was recommended that a
report be produced to enable the relevant Executive Member to decide
whether or not to accept the Ombudsman's findings. This was issued as a
result of an Ombudsman case at that time which found maladministration on
the part of the Council. Between this and the present date, the person
holding the post of Monitoring Officer has changed twice and we are not
aware of any further reports of this nature.

The report contains details of the complaint and the Ombudsman's findings
and there is nothing to suggest that the Ombudsman `brought to the
attention of the council the fact that a member of Stockport Borough
Council staff had misled them, lied to them or done anything else to
hinder their investigation' as per the details of your request or that
this was even a factor in the investigation; therefore based on this, the
answer to your original request would be `zero'. The ICO was not satisfied
that this answered your request and required the Council to undertake
further investigations.

In our original response we explained that in order to answer your request
accurately, we would have to review 301 complaint files. This figure
includes cases investigated by the LGO as well as `premature' complaints
referred back to the authority to be investigated further. The majority of
these cases are not stored electronically; electronic case spreadsheets
containing details of cases to supplement paper files only start from
2007/08. In addition, all files (including premature complaints) have been
archived together for years 2004/05, 2005/06, and 2006/07; this means that
where it is not obvious that a case is premature, we would have to review
each case for these years to extract the information you requested.

Although we included figures for the previous five years as you requested
in our initial estimate when calculating the cost of compliance, it is
Council policy to retain hard copies of complaints documentation for only
three years from the date the complaint was closed. This means the Council
no longer holds some of the information you requested i.e. case
information from 2004/05. On this basis, we revised our estimate. The
information we currently hold which may be relevant to your request is as
follows:

2005/06 - 55 cases would need to be reviewed to locate, retrieve and
extract the information required.

2006/07 - 52 cases would need to be reviewed to locate, retrieve and
extract the information required.

2007/08 - 35 cases would need to be reviewed to locate, retrieve and
extract the information required.

Based on these figures, the Council would have to review 142 cases between
2005/06 to 2007/08 in order to respond to your request.

We originally explained that we estimated it would take approximately 10
minutes per case to comply with your request. This was based on an
estimate of the amount of time it would take to identify appropriate cases
on spreadsheets, check any additional letters scanned into a case
management system and review hard copies of the cases to extract the
information.

The Council has since carried out a representative sample review of 20
cases: nine cases reviewed for 2005/06; six cases reviewed for 2006/07;
five cases reviewed for 2007/08. The total time taken was approximately 2
hours and 20 minutes which equates to an average of seven minutes per case
file reviewed. Based on this sample, it would take almost 17 hours to
review the 142 available cases to provide any information relevant to your
request.

Following the outcome of the ICO's investigation, the Council has reviewed
the 142 relevant cases. This review found no mention that the Ombudsman,
in carrying out an investigation, has `brought to the attention of the
council the fact that a member of Stockport Borough Council staff had
misled them, lied to them or done anything else to hinder their
investigation'.

Yours sincerely,

Claire Naven

Claire Naven

Data Protection & Freedom of Information Officer

Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

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