Non-compliance and escalation procedure - FOI Policy
The Council should ensure that every service area recognises its responsibilities in responding to FOI/EIR requests and the importance of being responsive and co-operative with the Information Governance team, enabling the Council to provide a professional citizen experience for all requesters.
The Information Governance team will ensure process stages are in place to minimise the event of late or non-compliant responses both in terms of statutory deadlines and to obtain timely and sufficient information from services (see Appendix 1 – information requests process timetable):
- Automatic calculation of deadline for response when request is logged (based on date of request)
- Internal deadlines set when asking Services for information to ensure 20 day deadline is met
- Relevant Executive Director and/or Communications lead officer copied in to/forwarded any new requests which are potentially contentious/politically sensitive
- Relevant Head of Service to be copied into chaser emails if services do not respond in a timely manner
- Executive Director to be notified if service does not make any response or fails to liaise with the FOI team by internal deadline set
- If non-compliance by a service in terms of providing all information required by the internal deadlines is persistent, the issue will be escalated to the Head of Law & Governance and the relevant Executive Director notified.
- FOI officer to advise requester if response will be delayed and where possible provide reasons for this
- Summary Performance reports to be included in the monthly Corporate Dashboard showing number of requests and response times by service area, including late responses, as well as any emerging trends in subjects of interest to requesters.
Quality of information
The Council has a legal duty to provide information if it is held by the organisation and is not subject to exemptions. The use of exemptions should be valid and where necessary supported by explanations or evidence that public interest tests have been undertaken (see Section 7 Internal Reviews). While services can indicate where they consider an exemption would apply, it is the remit of the FOI Requests Officer / Information Governance team to make the final decision as to whether the exemption applies after considering all of the relevant information held by the Council.
The Information Governance team are reliant on Services being transparent and accurate with the data that is provided and will provide support where possible to the requester if data is unavailable or subject to exemptions (e.g. advising if the information requested will become available in the future due to new systems). If the Service subsequently identifies errors or omissions in the information they have provided, they should notify the Information Governance team immediately to enable the Information Governance team to provide a revised/corrected response.
All council services should ensure sufficient resource to manage and ensure the completion of FOI requests within the statutory timeframe, identifying 2 named Service Information Officers who are responsible for co-ordinating contributions to requests for their services areas and being the first points of contact for the FOI team for all requests. Services should keep the Information Governance team updated of any staff changes or significant absences and ensure a replacement is identified if a designated Service Information Officer leaves or can no longer continue in that role.
Where possible services should publish information frequently requested through FOI requests on the Council’s web-site and keep this updated to reduce the demand on the Information Governance team and respective services (see Section 9 Transparency of Information).
