A senior York council official has apologised for what he described as an ‘unacceptable failure of service’.
It follows the discovery that City of York Council has a backlog of 261 Freedom of Information cases.
These are requests for information to the council that have either not been answered, or that the council has no record of answering.
Under the law, public bodies have 20 working days to respond to a request.
York council’s director of governance and monitoring officer Bryn Roberts said that the situation has become serious enough for the Information Commissioner’s Office to step in.
“The ICO has indicated that it intends to issue an enforcement notice in the near future, requiring that the council resolves the backlog,” he told members of the audit and governance committee.
“Generally, the timescale for resolution of such things is six months.”
The council has now issued a response to 83 of the 261 requests, which is nearly a third of the backlog. And an action plan is being drawn up to both deal with the remaining outstanding cases, and to ensure such a backlog doesn’t happen again.
“We’re confident that we will clear the backlog within any likely timescale, certainly within the six months,” he said.
‘Workloads get larger’
Mr Roberts added: “I need to be clear that this is unacceptable failure of service for which I personally apologise.
“While some of the backlog may be as a result of work pressures on officers, combined with the effects of the pandemic, it’s not an acceptable position, and will be remedied as soon as possible.”
One of the possible reasons for it was that “teams get smaller, workloads get larger. And rightly or wrongly, individuals may have made a choice that says, I’m sorry, I’m too busy to deal with that.”
He said one way to reduce the number of FOIs was to publish more information on the council’s website.
Cllr Rachel Melly told him: “It can be very difficult to find information on the council website”.
Mr Roberts said they were considering “whether we create a specific data website, or a data page as part of the council’s website”.
Asked about the training council staff receive in this area, he said “it will have to form part of the action plan that we ensure that people are retrained”.