Council contacted this newspaper unhappy about a claim made regarding the number of FOI complaints lodged at Council as seen in the Council Annual Report in each of the two years 2018/19 and 2019/20. The table in the Annual Report says 20 and 27 but Council insists that the figures are 11 and 27, not 20 and 27.
Council says that; “In 2018/19 there were 11 FOI requests and nine FOI application enquiries, reported as 20 in the Annual Report.”
They also said that “between 2018/19 and 2019/20 Council changed its FOI reporting methodology”.
Council explained they no longer count the enquiries only numbers. That would arrive at 11 for 2018/19 as they now claim even though the annual report still says 20 in above table. They also said; “there were also a further three requests that were satisfied outside of FOI and three applications were transferred to other government bodies to respond to”. These numbers appear to not be shown in the above table either.
The report fails to detail the methodology or mention that they have used two different counting methods in numbers shown in the same table and the 8 enquiries in 2018/19 is supposed to be 9. Council agreed that; “we recognise that the table included in the Annual Report is probably more confusing than it is useful, and it will be removed from the final version of the document”.
Anyway, this is the final way in which they came to the figures of 11 for 2018/19 and 27 for 2019/20. Pay attention!
In the table above, they only counted the 8 “access granted in full or part” and the 3 “incomplete at end of year” to get TOTAL of 11 in the 18/19 year.
In the next year, 2019/20, they again excluded the “enquiries” number which left 24. To get the 27 they then added the 3 from the previous year (incomplete ones) which they had already counted in the 11 from the previous year. That’s double counting again.
A Council spokesperson confirmed the accuracy of this article. This newspaper confirms the inaccuracy of Council’s Annual Report.
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