Rather a long time ago while working for BT I had a strange feeling that
something odd was going on. Over several months speaking to many people and
listening to ten or a dozen fairly innocuous stories I began to link them
all together and paint a much more interesting picture. To cut a long story short, a £12
million (BT’s estimate, not mine) fraud was lurking just below the surface.
Not on the same scale but I felt similarly uncomfortable after speaking to Council employees, parents of
SEND children who have had meetings with social workers and going through a
whole load of @tonyofsidcup’s FOIs; not all of them are featured here but I read them all. I gained
the impression that Bexley Council is expending a great deal of effort into
hiding as much from prying eyes as is possible.
It was always thus but the techniques may have changed. I tried my luck at a probing FOI.
• For how long does the Council retain email messages of people who leave Council
employment for any reason? Answer 93 days. @tony had been told 30 days and refused
FOI responses for that very reason.
• For how long does the Council retain
the email messages of Councillors who resign or lose office? They are encouraged
to save anything particularly important to SharePoint but after that their
accounts are deleted after 93 days. (SharePoint is a Microsoft storage
facility.)
• At what stage if any is written correspondence shredded? It depends on what the
[unspecified] legislation demands.
• When are the
telephone calls recorded for training or any other purpose erased? Answer, after 40 days.
• Webcasts are lost to public view after three months. Are they archived for later
retrieval if needed? Answer, only for a further three months.
• For how long are Zoom/Team recordings of meetings retained? Answer, they
prefer not to record them at all but if they do, except in very special
circumstances, the retention time is 24 hours. Council Officers had said 48
hours and an SEND parent said he had experienced Friday meetings being
unavailable for viewing on the following Monday.
• Agendas and Minutes are available on the Council's website for many
years. Have any ever been removed for any reason whatsoever because of a
request by an individual? Answer, there has been only one such request and the
Agenda was removed on the grounds that it was more than six years old and
contained personal information. (Surely many must do?)
Data storage is dirt cheap. I can remember when a nine gigabyte disc cost
£1,800, I have a thousand gigbyte disc being delivered on Monday. I think it was
about fifty quid. I have all my emails going back into the previous millennium.
why can’t Bexley Council afford to do that?
My guess is that throwing data away prematurely is part of the secrecy regime
and minimises the risk of having to release anything important via FOI.
Note: A 300 megabyte disc cost around £350 in 1987. BT paid for mine!
A thousand gigabytes (a terrabyte) is 3,333 times bigger than 300 megabytes.
Scaled up the price would be well over £1 million had the capacity been available in 1987.