Operations Directorate

Chief Operating Office: Althea Loderick

Ask for: / Gary Gold

Mr D Paulley / Direct line / 0208 4968118
Date: / 22nd January 2016
Your ref:
Ref : / FOI 2015-01804

Dear Mr Paulley,

Thank you for your request for information received by the Council on. In your request, you asked for the following information:

Please supply me with all recorded information about this decision.

Please provide the contents of all minutes, position papers,

agendas, policies, procedures, and communications about this

decision. Please tell me who is responsible for this decision, and

what their legal training is.

This is a valid Freedom of Information Request, and you are

required to respond to it even though it isn't made on your form.

Note the guidance from the Information Commissioner, available at

request/

"For a request to be valid under the Freedom of Information Act it

must be in writing, but requesters do not have to mention the Act

or direct their request to a designated member of staff. It is good

practice to provide the contact details of your freedom of

information officer or team, if you have one, but you cannot ignore

or refuse a request simply because it is addressed to a different

member of staff. Any letter or email to a public authority asking

for information is a request for recorded information under the

Act."

I note that is listed on

your webpage at

as the

correct email address by which to submit complaints / requests for

review, so I strongly suspect that emails sent to this email

address are read. As this will be received by a member of Council

staff in an email, you are obliged to respond to it irrespective of

whether you would prefer me to use the form. I further note that in

FS50559082 the ICO decided that the email server log showing that

the request had been transferred to the Cabinet Office's server was

persuasive evidence that the request had been received. I shall be

keeping this log.

If you attempt to refuse to answer this request and direct me to

the web form, I will appeal this through your internal review

procedure, through an ICO DN and if necessary to the FTT and STT.

This was a new system being operated by a new team of staff

Unfortunately some of those involved at the early stages of implementation have left the council.

Some of the standard emails used to reply to emailed FoI requests did not have the correct link directly to the new FoI pages. Those that did would have gone to a page where only relevant information was required. A Freedom of Information request (FOI) can be submitted using the online form but without registering for an account on the Council's website. By doing it this way, it is not required to submit any more information than a return email or postal address and your surname. Your home address and any other personal details are not required for this.
In order to complete this, please select 'continue without an account' when presented with the registration/sign-in page after selecting. If you have already signed up for an account and are currently logged in, you will need to sign out before seeing this option and then selecting the FOI option on the following web page:

The new site is designed to get quicker responses to enquirers and has automatic search engine to look for similar requests and notify the requester of those so that they may, if they are seeking information previously requested get an instant response, this is an improvement on our old system.As it is designed to be more efficient we would hope that all enquires would be dealt with quicker.An increasing number of our residents wish to seek our services through a digital system

However we do appreciate that the initial responses indicated that the Council would not be picking up FoI requests unless submitted in a certain way via the new portal. This error in the standard communications was very quickly spotted and all FoI requests received have been logged. The standard response has been changed and now makes this clear and the link goes directly to the correct page for registering FoI requests if the requester wishes to avail themselves of the new updated system but they do not have to do so.

We will continue to encourage requesters to use the portal as we hope they will find the additional functionality will help with their enquires especially by automatically linking them to information relating to similar enquires received. But it is not the only way to make a FoI request and this is made clear in our standard responses and in training we have given to all staff handling requests.

I apologise for the initial error and hope you are satisfied with my response.

I trust that the above satisfies your enquiry. If you have any queries about this letter, please contact me. Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, you have the right to complain about the Council’s response to your request for information. If you wish to pursue such a complaint, please do so within 28 days from the date of this letter and ask for a review of the Council’s decision. Please write to: The Information Officer, Learning from Complaints Team, Room 104, Waltham Forest Town Hall, Walthamstow E17 4JF, or email . Please mark your request clearly as “Request for Review”.

If after receiving a response to the review, you remain dissatisfied with the Council’s response, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner. Further information can be obtained via the Information Commissioner’s helpline 0303 123 1113 or their website at:

Regards

Gary Gold

Business Hub Manager