The Super Soaraway Evening Post is going at it hammer and tongs on the supposedly thorny subject of relationships between NCC officers and elected members today. The most high profile aspect of this has been the inability to keep a Chief Exec for more than about 20 minutes causing a fortune to be paid out in severance payments.
Anyway, today the EP provides a useful summary of key events in the reporting of this issue by the Audit Commission and reports on attempts to get hold of a report by external consultants on the same issue.
It seems that EP requested a copy of the report under the Freedom of Information Act last April but doesn't seem to have exctly chased it up or challenged it when the request was refused. They don't mention which of the exemptions were used by NCC, only saying that the council's Legal Officer said that it wasn't in the public interest for the report to be released. Unfortunately, NCC are not the fiirst organisation to confuse 'politically embarrassing' with 'not in the public interest', someone really needs to explain the difference to these people. Why the EP didn't refer the matter to the Information Commissioner is not explained.
At around the same time Lib Dem Cllr Tony Sutton (recently on the receiving end of JoCo's blistering savagery, who called him a 'prat') has also been trying to get hold of the report and associated correspondence. He was gently informed by the council's Legal Officer that he "did not need to see the document to carry out his duties as a councillor". Cllr Sutton has apparently now submitted his own FoIA request, been refused and appealed. This is still ongoing.
On an admittedly less fundamental note, my own FoIA requests have yet to be resolved and they are outside the 20 day time limit for an appeal, not to mention the time limit for the info they forgot to provide on my original request. I've given them until Friday lunchtime before I pass it on to the ICO.
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