Dear Breckland District Council,

I would like to request a copy of your register of land and building assets, as you are required to publish annually under paragraphs 35-37 of the Local Government Transparency Code 2015 [1].

I would like to request that the information is provided in an open machine-readable format, such as a CSV file or a spreadsheet, preferably aligned with the standard template / schema recommended by the Local Government Association in Annex 1 of their "publishing land and social housing asset and parking information" guidance [2].

I would also like to request the land area / floor area for each entry in the register. (This corresponds to the "Additional recommended information" fields "Size building" and "Size Land" LGA's schema in Annex 1 of [2].)

Furthermore, under the Re-Use of Public Sector Information regulations, I would also like to request permission to re-use the supplied information under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3, for the purposes of (a) improving the mapping data in OpenStreetMap and (b) making the information available to others in a convenient format and under an open license.

I have searched on your website and have found your "Transparency" page [3], from which is linked a document called "Breckland Council Asset Register 2020" [4]. I assume this is your attempt to comply with the relevant provisions of the Local Government Transparency Code. However, as well as being in a non-machine-readable PDF format, I believe that document fails to meet a number of the requirements, viz:

* You are required to provide UPRNS, which are numbers with up to 12 digits. See e.g. https://www.geoplace.co.uk/addresses-str... The "UPRN" column contains reference codes that are not UPRNs. (Presumably they are your own internal reference codes.)

* The required "map references" (OS grid reference or lat/lon coordinates) are missing.

* Apart from the final page, the required freehold/leasehold designation of each asset is missing, as are the other details required for each type.

* The published doument is titled "Breckland Council Asset Register 2020" suggesting is is more than 18 months out of date. The code requires you to publish updates at least annually. The document may have been updated more recently. If so, you should make sure the date at which it was current is made clear.

* I am suspicious that the published list may not be complete. I was unable to spot entries for a number of parcels of land that I believe that the Council owns in Thetford, including: The water-meadows adjoining the Abbey Farm estate, the open green space on the Abbey Farm Estate, various pieces of open space on the Cloverfields Estate, Trafalgar Wood and the water-meadows between the Cloverfields Estate and the river, the grass land east of Melford Bridge between the river and the roundabout, land to the north-east of The Link car park, the green space on Glebe Close, the Minstergate Car Park, and the adjacent shops (with the exception of the ex-Somerfield building), and Butten Island.

I look forward to receiving your response.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Whittaker.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio...
[2] https://www.local.gov.uk/sites/default/f...
[3] https://www.breckland.gov.uk/article/424...
[4] https://www.breckland.gov.uk/media/11778...

Yours faithfully,

Robert Whittaker

Dear Breckland District Council,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Breckland District Council's handling of my FOI request 'Register of land and building assets'. A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r...

You will recall that I requested "a copy of your register of land and building assets, as you are required to publish annually under paragraphs 35-37 of the Local Government Transparency Code 2015" and asked that "that the information is provided in an open machine-readable format". I pointed out a number of aspects of your current list at [1] where information that you are legally required to publish is missing.

Unfortunately, you do not appear to have considered my request properly. The list you supplied has only around 250 records, whereas the list at [1] contains over 400. Unless you have disposed of a significant number of assets recently, the list you have supplied now is vastly incomplete. It also contains less information about each asset than the published list [1]. In particular, the postcodes are absent and there is less address/description information about each asset. These items are required by paragraph 37 of Local Government Transparency Code 2015 [2] and thus fall within the scope of my request.

Furthermore, of the several items of missing information that I pointed out, the only one you addressed in your response was the UPRNs. And in that case I believe that your claim not to hold them is false. While you may not store the UPRNs to your asset database, you most certainly do hold them, as they will be in the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) that the Council maintains. The LLPG is either held by the Council, or held by a third part on behalf of the Council (which counts as the same thing for FOI purposes). To pre-empt any attempt to apply s21 to the UPRNs, they would not be "reasonably accessible" to me through  https://www.findmyaddress.co.uk/ as I am not able to agree to the terms and conditions required to access that site.

Your response has not dealt with the other items I requested, viz: coordinates, area/floor space, freehold/leasehold designation, and the incompleteness of the list. Coordinates would at least be held via the UPRN, the area of each land asset would be held in your GIS system (some areas have been provided in your response, but not all), the freehold/leasehold designation would be held in your property records, and you certainly have more assets recorded in your GIS system going by a map you previously supplied to me.

On top of all this, your response was late, only being provided after the statutory 20-working-day deadline.

Please review your handling of my request, and provide a revised response that actually fulfils your statutory obligations under FOIA. In particular, for each class of information I have asked for you are required under FOIA s1 to state whether it is held, and then either provide it or state a valid exemption. I would also ask for an explanation of why it took you longer than 20 working days to provide your original response.

Finally, FOIA matters aside, I would remind you that almost all of the information I have requested is information you should already be publishing at least annually under the The Local Government (Transparency Requirements) (England) Regulations 2015 [3]. Under your FOIA s16 obligation to provide Advice and Assistance to requesters, could you please advise me what assessment you have made of your current compliance with these regulations, and any plans (including time-scales) that you have to rectify the issue.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Whittaker

[1] https://www.breckland.gov.uk/media/11778...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio...
[3] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015...

Dear Breckland Council,

In your most recent response to this request, which you made on 4th January, you stated that you aimed to update your asset register within the first quarter of 2023. With that time-scale, I was happy to give you the benefit of the doubt and allow you some time to get things fixed. However, the first quarter of 2023 has been and gone, and you have not yet updated your asset register to publish all the information that you are legally required to.

I would be grateful if you could provide me with an update on your progress with updating your asset register. What stage are you currently at, and what is the current estimate for when a compliant register will be published?

As far as my original FOI request is concerned, your internal review response of 4th January did not address "the other items I requested, viz: coordinates, area/floor space, freehold/leasehold designation, and the incompleteness of the list". I was content to let that slide, under the assumption that the full register would be published shortly. Since this hasn't happened, I now require you either to provide that information without further delay or to state a valid FOI exemption for each part/class that you are still withholding.

Finally, please consider this email a formal complaint that Breckland Council is failing to comply with paragraphs 35-37 of the Local Government Transparency Code 2015, as required by the The Local Government (Transparency Requirements) (England) Regulations 2015.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Whittaker

Dear Breckland Council,

I would like to follow up on my previous email to you from this address, dated 12 April 2023. WhatDoTheyKnow confirms that this message was received by your email server. In case you have mislaid it, a copy of the email can be found online at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r... .

In the email, I asked for an update on your progress with compiling and publishing a compliant "Land and Property Asset Register" as required by the Local Government Transparency Code, requested you provide valid exemptions under FOIA for continuing to withhold information from my original FOI request, and submitted a formal complaint over your lack of compliance with the Transparency Code. You have yet to respond on any of these points.

I would be grateful if you could acknowledge this message by return, and respond to all three points at your earliest convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Whittaker

Dear Breckland Council,

Many thanks for your response. It is disappointing to hear that there is now no timetable for you to complete the work on your Asset Register. Contrary to the impression given in your response to my complaint BCMP-013447, you are failing to meet not just "government guidelines" but an actual legal duty. I was amazed to read that complying with the law is (to quote your response) "not a priority for the Council". You will see that I have already emailed you separately to request a review of your response to my complaint.

On the FOI matter, I wonder whether you are under the misapprehension that if you do not hold a list of the information requested in a convenient consolidated form then it is "not held" for FOI purposes. This is incorrect. If you have the information requested -- even if it is dispersed across many records, or is held on your behalf by a third party -- then it is deemed to be "held" for FOI purposes. If any of the information is held, then you are required to provide it or state which exemption you are relying on to withhold it. In addition, whether you hold the information or not, you are required by FOIA s1(1)(a) to confirm whether or not it is held. You have not yet done this for (to quote my email of 5th December) "the other items I requested, viz: coordinates, area/floor space, freehold/leasehold designation, and the incompleteness of the list". I would request that you do so now, without any further delay.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Whittaker

Dear Breckland Council,

Many thanks for your response and clarification. (You previous statement "We do not intend to refuse disclosure of the information (once held)" appeared to suggest that you think that the information is not currently held, which I do not believe is correct.)

Given your clarification, for each of the classes of information contained in "coordinates, area/floor space, freehold/leasehold designation, and the incompleteness of the list" please confirm explicitly whether or not the missing information is currently held (as I don't believe you have done so yet). And then for the information that is held, please either supply it without delay or provide the FOI exemption that you are relying on to withhold it.

To do so is a clear legal requirement under FOIA, and so there is no excuse for you to wait for the ICO's investigation and ruling to comply.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Whittaker

Dear Breckland Council,

I am writing to you regarding my FOI/EIR/RoPSIR request BFOI-013009 "Register of land and building assets" that I originally made on 22 October 2022 [1]. I trust you will have seen the ICO Decision Notice IC-218499-B6R8 [2] that was dated 7th August 2023.

Unless you have already lodged an appeal against the Decision Notice, you are required by the ICO to to take a number of steps within 35 calendar days of the Notice being issued. By my reckoning the 35 days will expire next week on Monday 11th September 2023. This message is to remind you that a response would be due by then, and that it should be sent to this email address.

Please note that my original request asked for the information in an "open machine-readable format". The PDF list currently available from your Transparency page [3], is not in such a format. Please also make sure that you respond to my re-use request made at [1] under the Re-Use of Public Sector Information Regulations, for any information supplied.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Whittaker

[1] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r...
[2] https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-tak...
[3] https://www.breckland.gov.uk/article/424...

Dear Breckland Council,

Many thanks for providing the additional information, including many UPRNs. However, I believe that your latest response still does not fulfil all of your duties under the Freedom of Information Act [1], and does not comply fully with the directions in the Information Commissioner's Decision Notice [2]. In particular:

1/ You have failed to comply fully with your duty to confirm or deny what information is held, contrary to FOIA s1(1)(a) and the Commissioner's Decision Notice.

My original request asked for the information you are required to publish under paragraphs 35-37 of the Local Government Transparency Code [3]. Some information is missing and no explanation has been given. Please state explicitly whether or not the following missing information is held by the council (in any form, 'extractable' or otherwise) :

* The "map reference" (i.e. geographic coordinates) for each land or building asset, as described in paragraph 37 of the Code.

* The leasehold/freehold "characteristics" as detailed in the bullet points near the end of paragraph 37 of the Code (under the headings "for freehold assets", "for leasehold assets" and "for other assets").

* The missing "Map ID" numbers for the assets where you have supplied a UPRN instead. (I assume these correspond to the "Unique asset identity" specified in paragraph 37 of the Code - but please confirm if this is the case. If not, then please state whether a separate "Unique asset identity" reference is held.)

* The missing UPRN numbers for those assets where one has not been provided.

For each of these classes of information, if the information is held, it must either be supplied or a valid FOI exemption quoted as part of a refusal notice.

I believe that you certainly hold coordinates for each asset. For those with UPRNs, coordinates will be present in your Local Land and Property Gazetteer. For all assets, there should be at least one set of coordinates associated with each one in your GIS mapping system. I assume that all of your assets will have a "Map ID" reference number. (I would suggest your spreadsheet should have separate columns for "Map ID" and "UPRN", to allow both to be shown where both are available.) From the Information Commissioner's decision notice, I assume that the assets for which you have not provided a UPRN do not have one, but you should confirm in your response that this is indeed the case.

2/ For some of the information held, you have neither supplied the information nor issued a valid refusal notice, contrary to FOIA S1(1)(b) & 17(1) and the Commissioner's Decision Notice.

In addition to any of the items above that are held, you also state in your response that "There may be small parcels of land owned by the Council not listed, but we do not have this data in an extractable format." This implies that you hold additional information within the scope of my request, but have not provided it. Just stating that the information is not in an "extractable format" is not a valid FOI exemption. Please describe more precisely what information is held about these "small parcels of land" and in what format. Then either supply it or issue a valid refusal notice for it.

(Note that paragraph 35 of the Code is clear that "Local authorities must publish details of *all* land and building assets".)

Both points above represent a failure of the Council to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. I also regard them as a failure of the Council to comply with ICO Decision Notice IC-218499-B6R8, which would constitute a Contempt of Court. I will be informing the Commissioner of this, and requesting he takes appropriate action. In the mean time, I would suggest that you make every effort to address the points above at the earliest opportunity.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Whittaker

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/200...
[2] https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-tak...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio...

Dear Breckland Council,

You have recently provided an additional response to this request, with the subject line "FOI 13009 Asset Register IC-278962-V2X9" . However, you have sent it to a different (personal) email address of mine, rather than the whatdotheyknow.com email address that I used when making the original request. I would be grateful if you could re-send your response to the whatdotheyknow.com email address that this message has come from, so that all the correspondence in this case will be in one place.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Whittaker

Dear Breckland Council,

Many thanks for your re-considered response. It it good that you have finally admitted that you do hold the remaining information I requested, and have now stated an exemption for the information that you are withholding.

As this is the first time you have formally invoked the s12 exemption, I believe I should be able to request an internal review of its application. I realise that the Information Commissioner has already issued a Decision Notice (IC-278962-V2X9) regarding your latest response. I could appeal this to the Information Tribunal right away, but since my grounds for review were not covered in that Decision Notice, I think it would be more expedient for all concerned if you were to provide your review response first. (Unfortunately, the Information Commissioner did not give me the chance to respond to your latest response before issuing the Notice.)

In the Council's latest response of 26th January (available online at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r... ) you have provided various estimates of the time it would take for compliance, based on work carried out on a sample of the data held. I have no reason to doubt the times claimed for the actions described, but in two cases I do not believe you have adopted anything like the most efficient approach for retrieving the relevant information.

(To provide an analogy, your proposed actions would be the digital equivalent of proposing to manually photocopy hundreds of loose leaf pages one by one, when your photocopier actually as an auto-sheet feeder that could do the whole job in one go.)

I accept that the work required to verify whether the land with unconfirmed ownership does indeed belong to the council would exceed the cost limit. But I do not accept that simply providing a complete list of all the areas of land held with whatever information about them is currently held about them in WebMaps and EstateMan would. (For the unconfirmed land, I think details of those parcels do fall within the scope of my original request. Without conducing any further investigations, the Council could simply return the geographic details that are held in WebMaps and flag them as having unconfirmed ownership.)

In the case of the information held within "Webmaps", I understand that this part of a system called "DynamicMaps" supplied by a company called "Cadline" ( https://services.cadline.co.uk/dynamic-m... , https://lbl.dynamicmaps.co.uk/MapThatDoc... ). Within this setup, map layers could be maintained outside the system using third-party software and then imported, or maintained within the "DynamicMaps" system. In the first case, the data will likely already be held in the "Shapefile" format, or could be converted to that format using the third-party software. In the second case, according to the user manual linked above, there are options to export the data either to Excel or as a Shapefile.

Once in Shapefile format, the attribute table is contained in the *.dbf file. This is actually in dBASE format (
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital... ) which can be opened in MS Access, Excel, or LibreOffice ( https://smallbusiness.chron.com/convert-... ). Thus, with a few clicks it would be possible for the Council to obtain the whole attribute table for the relevant data held in their WebMaps system as an Excel file. This would take a competent user a few minutes at most, which is far less than the estimate provided based on manually copying each record from the WebMaps system.

I do not know if the representative coordinates for each area are stored directly in the attribute table. But if not, standard tools for manipulating Shapefiles (e.g. the open-source QGIS software) could be used to convert the shapefile polygons to point centroids, add the centroids to the attribute table, and export the result as an Excel file. Again, this would take just a few minutes.

Even if the above approach does not work for some reason, I understand that the "DynamicMaps" suite holds its data in a PostgreSQL database. So whatever data is needed could be extracted with a suitably crafted SQL query. Again this would only take a competent user less than an hour to write.

For the information held in the "Estateman" system, I was unable to find anything about this system online. But it is inconceivable that a Council would use a system that does not allow it to export its data from the system in an standard structured format. (Otherwise it would be effectively permanently locked in to that one supplier's system.) The export formats available might not include Excel, but there would be a format that can be read and manipulated programmatically by a suitable skilled IT professional. If the council does not have such expertise in house I would be happy to advise them on what would be possible if they provided details of the export formats available. As above, if the export method does not work for some reason, the underlying data will likely be held in a database system and so could be queried directly with a suitably crafted SQL query.

There is potentially an issue with matching the Estateman data to the Asset Register list if common IDs are not used in the two datasets. (Matching on inconsistently formatted addresses would be difficult.) Since the Council is legally required to publish this data, I'm sure they're working to ensure common IDs are used (e.g. UPRNs). But if they are not there yet, then I would consider a separate table of the occupancy data would be the next best thing, and still fall within the scope of my original request.

I trust the Council will now reconsider its position here, and seek to provide further information. If you wish to continue reliance on the s12 exemption, I would expect you to provide more information about how the in-scope information is stored, what formats it can be exported in from your software systems, and why the methods I have proposed above do not work.

Finally, I would like to refer you to my previous email of 25th September 2023: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r... , in which I noted that your latest release was missing MapId values for the entries where you had provided UPRNs. You previously provided MapID values for these entries, and I believe that to comply with the Local Government Transparency rules, you should provide them alongside the UPRNs rather than replacing them. Since you previously provided these MapID values, I can't see that s12 would apply, and I would ask you to reinstate them in an updated release.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Whittaker

PS: It appears that the Council may be lacking sufficient technical expertise to be able to efficiently extract the data it holds and assemble it into the form required by the Local Government Transparency Regulations. I would be more than happy to discuss your processes in more detail with your IT team and provide some free advice and suggestions if that would help save you (and hence taxpayers) time and expense. Do let me know if you would like to take me up on this offer.

Dear FOI Team,

As per my original request of 22nd October 2022 [1], I am requesting the information that should be in your register of land and building assets, which you are required by law to publish annually under paragraphs 35-37 of the Local Government Transparency Code 2015 [2].

In your latest response of 26 January 2024 [3] you have conceded that you do hold all the information, but are withholding what has not yet been supplied under a claimed s12 exemption. I am disputing the application of the exemption to the parts of the information that are held in in a structured format in your WebMaps and EstateMan systems, on the grounds that it should be relatively quick and straightforward to extract them, by using alternative methods to the ones you described. For my detailed arguments, see [4].

Specifically, I think you should be able to provide, as part of an updated register:

* A line in the register for each land asset that is a separate item in your WebMaps system, together with its Map ID, representative coordinates, the land area, and (where present) the UPRN. (Previous releases were missing some land parcels, and some of the parcels included were missing some of the other data.) This should include land where you are unsure of the ownership. No further investigation is required here, but the unconfirmed land can be flagged via a suitable machine-readable entry (a 0 or 1 would do) in an additional column.

* Details of the occupation status from your EstateMan system for relevant properties. If possible, these should be matched to the main register and the information included in additional columns for the relevant rows. But if there is no easy way to match them up (e,g. the EstateMan system does not store URPNs or some other common reference number) then a separate list of these properties with the details would probably be acceptable.

As I said before, I would be happy to provide any assistance to you in extracting this information, and in compiling the asset register more generally.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Whittaker

[1] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio...
[3] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r...
[4] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/r...