Freedom of Information...Will be Along in a While (reprise)

I love this site, it could pretty much write the blog for me, although you'd miss my rapier like wit and repartee.

No, you would.

Anyway, we talked a little while ago about NCC's seeming inability to respond to Freedom of Information requests in a timely fashion and I mentioned that someone had made a FoI request about this.

Well NCC has responded, although by my reckoning, a day late. They could have put a bit of effort into presenting the data as well.

The questioner has helpfully added an annotation with the percentages of responses made in time by year -

2005 - 53%
2006 - 34%
2007 - 40%
2008 - 26%*
2009 - 37% so far

Overall, they have responded to FoI requests on time in 31% of cases. Not particularly good in my opinion.

There's quite a bit of other interesting data about other issues such as the number of occasions where data wasn't held and stuff.

On a related note, I'm becoming increasingly concerned that NCC is quietly sitting on information that it has stated it would routinely publish on its website. I'm talking of the decision to install CCTV in Forest Fields which has still to find its way into the 'Portfolio Decisions' section of their website. It is mentioned in a 'Local Issues' report to the next Area 4 Committee meeting but all it says is that the matter has been referred to JoCo to make a decision, which is a bit out of date.

I'm also wondering what has happened to the Standards Committee, no minutes for the last meeting on 21 April and no agenda published for the next meeting due on 20 July, less than a week away. The Standards Committee is of course looking into Cllr Grocock's 'alleged' part in the housing scandal. Funny how they should go off the radar at such a time.

* NCC would probably want us to point out that 2008 included an exceptionally large number of requests due to lots of staff writing in to find out how their terms and conditions would be affected by single status. Some might suggest that the information should have been handed over at the start of the process. I'm just saying.