Sheffield Council failed to meet FOI targets as complaints mounted last year

The damning figures were revealed in a report detailing the council’s information management performance during the 2021/22 financial year – which was only just published ahead of this week’s audit and standards committee meeting.

By law, the council should respond to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests within 20 working days and if it fails, complaints can be raised with the Information Commissioner (ICO).

The council received 1,691 requests for information that year but answered only 75.9 per cent in time. This was way off the Information Governance Board’s target of 95 per cent.

It was an improvement on the previous year when just 64.6 per cent of requests were responded to on time but during that year, the council froze responses to FOI requests for four months due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sarah Green, senior information management officer and data protection officer, said: “Now that we are out of the pandemic, can we do better? Yes, of course we can do better. Let’s put as much information up there for our customers as we can. We recognise that and there is a programme to start putting things up more openly.”

Despite missing the mark, the council said it had improved and in the last quarter of 2021/22 it responded to 86 per cent of requests on time – although, this is still below target.

Council officers said: “The improvement in the compliance rate is in line with the work which has taken place across portfolios to address the backlog and to improve the council’s compliance rates. This also includes the move to an online automated platform that has optimised processes.”

At December’s full council meeting, the council said it still had a backlog of more than 200 FOI requests.

Complaints to the Information Commissioner

If a requester is unhappy with the council’s handling of a request they can complain by asking for an internal review.

The authority had 44 internal reviews last year, 16 of which are still outstanding.

Of the 28 the council dealt with, the majority were resolved by either the authority or requester backing down.

Complaints that are not resolved by an internal review can be taken to the ICO. This happened in 17 cases last year and of those, 13 related to the council missing the deadline to respond and the ICO sided with the complainants in all of them.

Council record management under scrutiny

The council’s record management came under fire recently following the publication of a long-awaited investigation into how it dealt with FOI requests relating to the tree felling scandal.

Law firm Bevan Brittan, which carried out the investigation, could not confirm whether the council always followed FOI law because the authority lost or mislaid too many key documents.

Interviews with officers at different levels of seniority revealed a lack of clarity around who was responsible for FOI decisions and what the process of handling requests was.

Sheffield Tree Action Group said Bevan Brittan’s report exposed an “astonishing absence of basic records management”.

The authority was told to improve its record management system, processes and training for all employees.