15 August - If at first you don’t succeed…
As far as I am aware @tonyofsidcup is the only Bexley resident
campaigning for a £12·50 a day motoring tax which if you are a driver like me whose
insurance premium was raised by 47·5% four days ago, is the last thing that
you would want. But @tony does not own a car and doesn’t have to use public
transport to get to work so probably he doesn’t much care, but as Bexley Council agitator he obviously has his uses.
I don’t know what his motive was but rather more than a month ago he submitted a
Freedom of Information request which said “Can you please supply all emails sent
from the Council Leader’s work email address between March 1, 2022 and March 1,
2023 that have “ULEZ” or “Ultra Low Emission Zone” in the message body or
subject, and have “bexley.gov.uk” in recipient’s email address.”
For some reason it reminds me of Mick Barnbrook’s FOI which asked for a copy of
Mayor Sharon Massey’s diary entry for the day she denied attending a strip
club in her Mayoral capacity. The request had to go to the Information
Commissioner to get it answered but sure enough the page said “strip club” or words to that effect.
Bexley Council didn’t want to answer @tony’s request either; you can always tell
when they are busy dreaming up an excuse: they go over time.
What
was the excuse this time?
The job entailed going to the Tools menu of Microsoft Outlook (or whatever) and
from there Advanced Find, enter the Search string and hit the Find now button.
My test run on a very large file of BiB readers’ emails produced 62 results in under two seconds.
Bexley Council claimed that there were either 526 emails in their file or there were 526
which contained the specified words. It was not clear which. They went on to say that it would take an
average of three minutes to read each one and cost £650 of mandarin time to plough through them.
Presumably that means they intended to redact the emails and asked for payment in order to proceed.
The answer is obvious. Reduce the date range to six months and thereby reduce the
potential charge to under £450 below which no charge can be levied.
A better plan might be to accept that Sadiq Khan is a liar and 4,000 of us are not going to die this year because
Tony Blair’s government encouraged us to buy diesel powered cars and Bexley
Council was merely trying to meet its Manifesto promise.