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FOI request (FOI224476)
FOI Administration
Requested Wed 04 October 2017
Responded Wed 04 October 2017Adur and Worthing Councils are currently reviewing how they provide an FOI support to process FOI's received. I would, therefore, be grateful if you could provide me with some information on how your Councils provide the FOI support function to help with this review.
In particular, I would be grateful if you could provide answers to the following:-
1. How many staff/ FTE does your Council have to provide dedicated support for FOI logging and responding to FOI requests. By this I mean receiving and responding to FOI requests and maintaining records? Which Department/Directorate do these staff belong to? Do you have any Job descriptions for the FOI staff that you could share with me or could you give me a summary of the scope of their work, excluding any confidential information. In cases where there is only one member of staff doing the work do you have a back up to support those members of staff? Also could you explain what role that your Service areas provide when they receive the requests?
2. How much is your Councils budget to provide FOI support?
3. Do you have a computerised FOI recording system and if so which one do you use?
4. On average how many FOI and DP requests do you receive each year? What are your performance stats for responding to FOI requests?
5. Are you planning on any changes to the way that you deal with FOI admin?
6. Any other useful information that would help me build a picture of how FOI's are processed locally would be very helpful.
Response
1. Hastings Borough Council has 1 FTE equivalent working on Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. This staff Member is member of the Continuous Improvement and Democratic Services team. The post holder also coordinates our corporate complaints process and provides administrative support to the Council political leadership. I do not have an up to date JD for this work, however in essence, the role involves coordinating responses to FOI in line with statutory requirements making use of the Firmstep platform to facilitate this process. Please note our IT in house staff have put in considerable work to build a suitable process from the Firmstep IT platform as the out of the box Firmstep solution did not meet our requirements. We do have limited resilience for this role and our committee administrators pick up the work when our FOI coordinator is on leave.2. See above.
3. See above.
4. Data Protection Subject Access Requests - We receive around 12 formal SAR requests per annum.
5. No major changes planned.
6. As suggested above, we have built a bespoke IT solution for our FOI process using the Firmstep platform. We believe that this would is well suited for the needs of a smaller local authority. We can discuss this further should you be interested.Please see below figures of requests received for the last 3 years:2015 - 6952016 - 8132017 to date - 668
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