Notes & Queries
Straight out the Salter book. Didn't actually address my complaint that they failed to provide 'copies' of the emails as requested.
To the Information Commissioner we go!
Freedom of Information Request No.1
Timeline
Response to Complaint
16 Jul 2007
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT - COMPLAINT
I am responding to your e-mail of 28 June 2007 to Mr Brooks, the Head of Legal Services, in response to his letter to you of 22 June 2007 responding to your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Your request was for copies of e-mails sent by Martin Salter MP or sent on his behalf by Anne Morgan to senior Council Officers, which you subsequently clarified to cover e-mails sent over the past two financial years to eight named officers.
In response, Mr Brooks sent you a schedule of e-mails sent from Martin Salter’s office, and advised that, in future, the Council would consider such a general request for information as vexatious, and would require any future request for information to be of a specific nature, relating to specific information.
In your e-mail of 28 June 2007, you asked the Council to clarify the grounds on which we would consider any such further request vexatious, and in this respect you referred to the Information Commissioner’s website, and you asked which of the grounds which you listed from the website we might believe a further request from you would come under. Whilst this is a hypothetical question, we would consider that another general request for information, along the lines of the one that you submitted in June 2007, could be considered vexatious under the first two grounds, ie it did not have any serious purpose or value, or it was designed to cause a disruption or annoyance. To address these concerns, as suggested by Mr Brooks, any future requests for information should be of a more specific nature, and should relate to specific information.
You go on to make comments about the deletion of e-mails from Council systems. As Mr Brooks explained to you in his letter of 22 June 2007, the Information Commissioner has advised all public authorities that they should only retain information for as long as they need to keep it, and should establish clear rules on retention and destruction. In this light the Council considers it good practice to delete e-mails regularly, unless there are good grounds for retaining them, in line with the Council’s retention and destruction procedures. I can assure you that no emails were deleted as a result of your Freedom of Information Act request: the point that Mr Brooks was making in his letter was that, whilst many of the officers that you listed would have received e-mails from Martin Salter MP over the past two years, most would routinely have deleted them, having dealt with them.
The point that you make about retrieving e-mails from the system archive is of interest, and the Information Commissioner has ruled on this, and sets out the position in more detail on his website. Particular circumstances of the individual case will be taken into consideration, as will Information Tribunal decision in the case of Harper v The Information Commissioner.
I have treated your e-mail of 28 June 2007 as a complaint, under the Council’s Complaints Procedure: the complaint reference is COM/CEX/07/02031. The complaint will be recorded as not upheld.
The Council’s policy and procedure on Freedom of Information provides for complaints to be investigated under Stage 1 of the Council’s Complaints Procedure, which I have now completed. If, at the end of this process, the applicant remains unsatisfied, you may complain to the Information Commissioner, and Mr Brooks gave you his address in his letter to you of 22 June 2007.
Yours sincerely
John Painter
Head of Central Administration