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News and Comment July 2023

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13 July (Part 2) - The Cost of Freedom

There may be no Children’s Services meeting to report on but fortunately there are still a few juicy bits from last week’s Finance meeting that may be worth an airing.

Councillor Rags Sandhu (Conservative, Bexleyheath) was interested in the number of Freedom of Information requests which is rising. 110 on Adults’ Social Care, 224 on Children’s, 474 on Finance in 2022 and as one might guess, the Places Directorate topped the list at 616. How many man hours is that the Councillor asked.

He was told that many can be answered in just an hour or two but the average is not known. The difficult ones are those that span more than one service area. Very few reach the charging threshold and even fewer people are willing to pay.

In the dim and distant past Bexley Council under a different Deputy Leader used to object strenuously to answering FOIs and famously told the Information Commissioner that one enquirer was a racist in a successful bid to stop him submitting any more. Thankfully everyone concerned in that shameful episode has gone and the comments made by Council officers and Deputy Leader David Leaf last week were entirely reasonable.

Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) was not quite so happy. He echoed the complaints that I used to hear regularly. If Bexley Council gave complete answers to FOIs there would be a lot less need for follow ups which leave residents liable to the vexatious tag.

Someone else who could be labelled vexatious is @tonyofsidcup, London’s premier ULEZ supporter. His latest FOI is “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 the recipient’s email address?”

I am not sure what his strategy is there. I would have thought that the final stipulation would rule out some of interest.

 

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