FIGURES released this week revealed that Freedom of Information (FOI) requests last year cost Warrington Borough Council £440,000 to process.
FOI requests can be made by members of the public to any publicly-funded body in the UK – including the borough council.
In 2011/12 the council received 852 requests, which took an estimated 23,000 hours of staff time to process.
During the first quarter of 2012/13 about 200 requests have been received.
To help cut costs the council is reviewing its FOI publication scheme and the “open data” sections of www.warrington.gov.uk in a bid to make it a one-stop-shop for information.
These sections already include information on allowances, council policies, spending over £500 and population profiles and statistics.
Cllr Terry O’Neill (pictured), leader of the council, said that often FOI is used by individuals and organisations to save time and research costs. He said in doing so the costs are being passed to the taxpayers of Warrington.
He said: “I’d appeal to anyone thinking about putting a request in with us in the future to consider carefully if the information can be gained in other ways. The staff time and effort that is required to deal with the increasing volume of requests is detracting from frontline services in tough financial times.
“One of this council’s pledges is to be as open and transparent as possible in serving our residents. Whilst FOI legislation puts a legal duty on the council to respond to requests for information a good deal of this is already available on our website and more will be added soon.”
The £440,000 cost of freedom
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Gary Skentelbery
Experienced journalist for more than 40 years. Managing Director of magazine publishing group with three in-house titles and on-line daily newspaper for Warrington. Experienced writer, photographer, PR consultant and media expert having written for local, regional and national newspapers. Specialties: PR, media, social networking, photographer, networking, advertising, sales, media crisis management. Chair of Warrington Healthwatch Director Warrington Chamber of Commerce Patron Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace. Trustee Warrington Disability Partnership. Former Chairman of Warrington Town FC.
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There have been reports about Mr O’Neill’s party colleague, Helen Jones MP, having to resort to FOI requests to obtain information run from the Labour council – if they aren’t going to be open with her what chance do the rest of us have.
Let;s put this cost of openess in perspaective – for example how few times would it pay the council’s “temporary” chief executive’s pay and allowances?
If it takes on average 27 hours to fulfil each request I would suggest a better filing system, an index would help.
“One of this council’s pledges is to be as open and transparent as possible in serving our residents. Whilst FOI legislation puts a legal duty on the council to respond to requests for information a good deal of this is already available on our website and more will be added soon.”
The problem is that no-one believes politicians any more.
Plus at £19 an hour you would hope the clerks carrying out the work would be more efficient.
I don’t understand how this figure could possibly be true. If a large proportion of these requests is for information that the council can make readily available on its website, how can it be possible that they still average over £500 a time? This implies that the council is spending dozens or even hundreds of hours on certain requests.
Helen Jones seems to carry out an awful lot of FOI requests from a Labour run Council then uses the replys to attack that same council. I wonder how many of these are from her and her son Chris Vobe we have to remember that at the end of the day this is our money and the more of these requests there are the less time the Council has to work for its residents?