READING Borough Council struggles with compliance regarding Freedom of Information requests as it continues to tackle underperformance.
A recent Audit and Governance meeting saw the council’s performance on the requests described as “disappointing.”
A complaint was upheld against the council in 2019, when an internal audit maintained that the council had not met the necessary level of timely responses.
The Information Commission Office sets a target of 95% of requests to be responded to within 20 working days, though it is a legal obligation that all should receive such a response.
Michael Graham, assistant director of legal and democratic services at the council, said the figures for the first quarter of 2022 are “disappointingly and stubbornly low.”
He also said that while reported figures of 58% overall compliance were found to be inaccurate, the actual figure of 63% was “still rubbish.”
He explained that colleagues in charge of auditing the council’s FOI performance recommended an action plan.
This has been signed off by the Corporate Management Team, and is “already underway.”
Mr Graham said: “We are communicating with all services across all parts of the council directly, and colleagues are picking up any issues and concerns about how the [Freedom of Information] policy is operated.”
“They are bringing with them the new, improved policy and procedure.”
“We also have a comms plan in place, which is about publishing and keeping FOI compliance high up on the agenda for staff internally.”
Mr Graham explained that the council also had a new reporting mechanism that would keep assistant directors at the council informed of under-performance in given areas of service.
He said that this would help with targets, which would now include aims to reach acceptable levels of FOI compliance, as would their annual governance statements.
“We propose to be coming back to January’s committee to give an update.”
Cllr Clarence Mitchell said that while he “appreciates the difficulty in getting on top of this,” there was a particular shortfall with regards to requests to children’s services.
“For Brighter Futures for Children particularly, they’ve only had 32 requests so far, compared to 38 last year,” Cllr Mitchell said.
“And yet the backlog has nearly doubled… I’d like to hear some reassurance that that particular aspect is going to be focused on as a priority.”
Mr Graham said that the request cases presented to BFfC were “probably the most difficult,” due to their sensitive and often historical nature, requiring physical documentation and manual redaction.”
He explained that new machine learning systems would be among the methods used to make the process cheaper and faster with redaction and processing.
“We’re very hopeful that we will be able to make some serious inroads as soon as we can get that software implemented.”
When challenged on what he felt the cause of the problems with FOI requests were, Cllr Graham said: “FOIs… are perhaps viewed as something else [colleagues] have got to do, with a deadline.
“Going back to the 2019 report, all of the management actions have been done… all the tangible things we’ve done haven’t made any impact.
“That’s why the action plan for the autumn is about engagement with the teams to see how far our communications are hitting home.
“We are building up a better picture of the responders in our departments.”
He said that the council was also encouraging the identification of which data sources it could publish as part of its normal operation that would pre-empt requests, “so they can avoid FOIs altogether.”
He concluded that analysis tools had “led us to the thought that we haven’t really got anything systematic or structural wrong.
“It is probably around the culture and communication, and that’s where we’ve focused.”
The meeting’s chair, Cllr Josh Williams, said that updates were expected to be seen in the next Audit and Governance meeting, currently set for January.
