Anyone can contact the Council and invoke the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the answer to most questions about the organisation. It is duty bound to respond within 20 working days – however there are exemptions to that obligation.

The statistics on its performance provided in FOI 12332645 issued on 28/2/24.

In the last 12 months, 1328 requests were responded to, of which 1130 (85%) were responded to on time. Of the total, 470 (35%) were not answered, due to there being an exemption.

Ironically, this specific FOI was only part-answered due to an exemption. The requestor asked how often each exemption had been applied in the last 12 months and the request was refused under s12 as it would take too long and “exceeds the approproate limit”.

In a response that is stereotypical of a Council, it calculated that to “locate, retrieve and extract information” would take 5 minutes per record; there are 470 records to check, resulting in a process time of 39 hours – something which it deemed to be too long.

This reponse gives an insight to the Council’s flawed thinking and institutional inefficiency.

All FOIs are on a log which are accessible at https://secure.derby.gov.uk/foi/. Each record shows whether there has been an exemption and, if so, what it was.

There were 2 ways in which the Council could have answered this FOI more efficiently:

1. Page through the above link and note down the exemptions for the last 12 months in order to answer the question. Derby News tested this approach and identified that it could easily be done in a few hours – well below the exemption threshold This is the long-winded way, or:
2. Download an extract from the FOI log database and perform a simple summation by exemption type – this would take a few minutes.

Comment

Answering FOIs is a legal obligation, however it is clear that Derby City Council seems to be fixated on finding any reason to avoid providing a full, open, and transparent, response. Such an approach can lead to further cost to the Council.

As the “39 hour process time” answer is auditable then one can only assume that the Council felt that that was the quickest and most efficient way of answering the question. It is worrying if this mentality is evident across the range of Council departments – albeit it does suggest a great opportunity for the future for efficiency savings!