14 July (Part 1) - Reasonable?
Following
yesterday’s rejection of an FOI application for a document which proves Bexley council operates
outside the law and deliberately so, a correspondent provided me with copies of
his correspondence with Bexley council.
He had asked for a copy of the document that gives the council leader the power
to appoint her cabinet. I have no idea why and to my mind it is far too obscure a
question to find a natural home on BiB. But each to his own.
Bexley council refused the request on the grounds that the information “is
already reasonably accessible elsewhere”. A web link was provided to a set of
documents, but reasonably? Really?
I started to count the pages in those documents but gave up. The final figure would be a long way
over 1,000 and the required paragraph next to impossible to find.
The jobsworth who made the decision to refer to a massive document instead of
the appropriate paragraph was Jemma Goode, Bexley’s Complaints and FOI Officer.
Giving as little information as possible has been developed into an art form in
Bexley. If too much of the truth comes out the ivory tower may fall.