Dear Northumberland County Council,

Using your website search facility, I am unable to locate any recent reports or minutes that deal with the quality of service provided at the leisure centres owned by the council and managed by Leisure Connection / Harpers Fitness (the contractor).

I therefore request with regard to Ponteland Leisure Centre,
and Riverside Leisure Centre (the centres):

1. Monitoring reports, letters and emails prepared by council officers during or following their visits to the centres. What I seek is a clear understanding of any issues identified between 1 June 2011 and 29 March 2012 and how these have been communicated to the contractor.

2. Copies of minutes or notes of meetings held from 1
June 2011 to 29 March 2012 between Council Officers and representatives of the contractor.

3. Copies of any papers prepared between 1 January 2011 and 29 March 2012 for Council managers, councillors or Council meetings that pertain in whole or part to issues or defects at the centres including contract performance.

4. Any Quest reports about the centres written between 1 June 2010 and 29 March 2012.

5. Copies of any Environmental Health or Health & Safety Reports or correspondence concerning the Leisure Connection or sub-contractors operating at the centres prepared between 1 April 2009 and 29 March 2012.

6. A report appeared in the Morpeth Herald (6.4.12) that quoted Councillor Dodd. He asserted that the temperature at Pontelands had been very chilly and also claimed, “After a long period of time trying to get to the root of the problem we found out that the pool has ten boilers, but only five had been working.”

Therefore, unless made explicit in the documents requested, in 1 - 5 I wish to know:
a) When the issue with multiple-defective boilers first arose last year?
b) When the Council first became aware of the issue?
c) When the boilers were repaired?
d) What were the temperature readings for the pool during the period when multiple boilers were defective?
e) What delayed identifying the problem?
f) What delayed fixing the problem?

I do not wish to cause unnecessary work and am open to suggestions that may provide sufficient information with less work for Council staff. Staff are welcome to contact me to make suggestions or invite discussion.

Please advise if any papers are awaiting publication, for example, minutes yet to be confirmed or a performance management report yet to be presented.

My preference is for all papers to be made available via
Whatdotheyknow.

Yours faithfully,

Paul Burns

Dear Leanne Beattie / Northumberland County Council

Thank you for your holding reply of April 26.

I have sent an email with my telephone number to your work email address. Please note that I have specified answers should be posted on What Do They Know.

It appears you fear that Leisure Connection / Harpers Fitness may not co-operate. Perhaps I should not be surprised after a councillor had problems establishing the facts.

I ask that you make clear any specific requests that the company declines to respond to.

Best wishes

Paul Burns

Dear Leanne Beattie,

Thanks for your update and my delayed response to it.

I am sorry that my last reply did not make clear that I had agreed to a delayed response from the Council.

May 14th is quite acceptable to me.

I wish other local authorities that I approached were more willing, as yours is, to take up my offer to discuss ways of reducing the work required.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Burns

Dear Leanne Beattie,

I am writing this following a prompt from Whatdothey know.

This is state in public that we have been in touch by email and that I accept there may be some delay in obtaining one outstanding document.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Burns

Dear Northumberland County Council,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Northumberland County Council's handling of my FOI request 'Performance of Leisure Connection / Harpers Fitness'.

My concerns relate time taken to make documents available, delays in posting on What Do They Know and the claim that one document is not available.

I first made my request on 6 April. Following discussion with Leanne Beattie I agreed on 27 April to limit the request and waive the usual response times.

On 14 May Leanne Beattie emailed me Quest reports produced for the Ponteland and Riverside centres in 2011. I emailed Leanne Beattie the same day saying, “We are almost there. The two Quest reports refer to two Quest Mystery Visitor reports. I believe these should also be posted as my request stated, ‘Any Quest reports about the centres written between 1 June 2010 and 29 March 2012.’ If you post on WhatDoTheyKnow what you sent as attachments and the two Mystery Visitor reports, I will acknowledge my request as met.”

On 17 May Leanne Beattie emailed, “I will certainly look at your request in relation to the Quest Mystery Shopping exercises. In addition should we locate these documents I will look to seek final approvals to request that this information is suitable to post on the WhatDoTheyKnow website.”

Following prompting from me, Leanne Beattie emailed on 20 June saying; “I have sourced the mystery shopping reports from leisure connections for Ponteland Leisure Centre and aim to include this within your information... Thank you for patience in this matter. I am still progressing with your request and hope to have this finalised at some point next week. I ... hope to respond fully to your request by the end of next week. “

On 28 June Leanne Beattie emailed, “I am continuing to follow up your request regarding access to 2 Quest mystery visitor requests conducted during 2011 for Riverside Leisure Centre and Ponteland Leisure Centre and will contact you once I have received approvals for this information.”

On 5 July Leanne Beattie emailed me the Ponteland Mystery Shopping Report- Conducted July 2011, Riverside Leisure Centre Mystery Shopping Report- Conducted January 2011, and Riverside Quest Report, recently conducted in March 2012 and stated, “I trust that this suite of information concludes your request.“

On 5 July I emailed; “Leanne, thank you for the reports sent, but the request is not completed for two reasons. 1)I do not have mystery visitor reports for Riverside Leisure Centre 2011 and Ponteland Leisure Centre 2011. 2) To comply with my request (“My preference is for all papers to be made available via Whatdotheyknow.”) and precedents established by the Information Commissioner, all material needs to be posted on Whatdotheyknow. Please advise.”

On 11 July, I emailed chasing for a reply and got an auto-reply saying Leanne Beattie would not be in her office until July 24.

I called Leanne Beattie in the week beginning July 30th as I had not heard from her. She said she would deal with the request.

On August 6th your emailed me three documents and said, “Following our telephone conversation last week I have received further information from Leisure Connection regarding Mystery Shopping reports. I have attached the detailed report for the Mystery Shopping Visit to Ponteland in July 2011. The updated report for Riverside Leisure Centre supersedes the report in 2011 and I believe due to changes in the Quest Assessment process also contains detail on the Mystery Shopping visit. “

On August 6th I responded. “Please note that my request is still not completed and I am close to lodging a complaint with the council about this as a prelude to reporting the matter to the Information Commissioner. My patience is near exhausted.
1)You say “The updated report for Riverside Leisure Centre supersedes the report in 2011.” Providing me with an additional report outside the time frame I specified does not entitle NCC to withhold, or fail to obtain, what I specified. I still require the missing 2011 Mystery Visitor Report for Riverside Leisure Centre.
2)My request specified that all documents should be posted on WhatDoTheyKnow. I need this to be done and given the extensive delays to date I will complain if it is not done by the end of this week.”

On August 7 Leanne Beattie emailed, “With regards to the (missing mystery visitor) report I will go back to Leisure Connection and again request a copy of this report.”

On 15 August I emailed, “This to advise that I will request a review of NCC’s handling of my request if the missing Mystery Visitor report is not posted by the end of Friday.”

Today, 17 August, Leanne Beattie stated, “Following discussions with Leisure Connection officers I have been advised that the Mystery Visit report for Riverside 2011 is incorporated within the Quest report. Throughout the report this has sections called QMV (mystery visit) and the colour changes to blue. This is the report from the MV and is now incorporated into the report which was sent previously.”

I find it most unsatisfactory that, if the above is true, it was not established at a much earlier stage.

However, I do not accept that the missing mystery visitor report does not exist because there are multiple references to the “Mystery Visitors Report” within the Quest March 2011 report for Riverside that Leanne Beattie sent me by email on 14 May 2012.

The general delay arouses suspicions that Northumberland County Council has not pursued its right to have access to a document to which it is fully entitled as it is integral to the effective performance management of its contract with Leisure Connection.

I am also disappointed with the time it take the Council to post documents on What Do They Know.

Please be advised, I will take these matters to the Information Commissioner, as I have several other tardy and incomplete requests, if I am not satisfied with the Council’s response.

I request that all future communication is posted via What Do They Know.

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

Yours faithfully,

Paul Burns

Dear Jill Watson,

Northumberland County Council missed the original target and promised a reply by 30th September.

If no satisfactory reply has been received by the end of Thursday of this week I will lodge a formal complaint with the Information Commissioner.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Burns

Dear Lorraine Dewison,

Thank you for your reply.

I will submit a complaint to the Information Commissioner.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Burns