FOI Request - Review of 10100355747 Safeguarding Statistics
Request 101003574617
Review of 10100355747 Safeguarding Statistics
I am writing to request an internal review of Moray Council's handling of my FOI request 'Safeguarding Statistics for Five Year Period From 25 April 2024 or Nearest 5 Year Period'.
1. You have calculated that gathering this information will exceed the cost limit, but I believe that this is an overestimation of the resource required.
This is because not only does Moray Council have a public sector equality duty in ensuring that all of it's operations comply in the interests of justice and equitability, but also more widely in ensuring compatibility with the Human Rights Act 1998 (as amended) and as detailed within the FOI questions themselves.
As such, it would be impossible for Moray Council to be able to ensure compatibility with human rights without being able to disseminate the data and it is reasonably forseeable that you would have the data in a form that is able to be scrutinised already.
The information requested is argued to have been duly over-calculated in terms of the cost of compliance with this Freedom of Information Request, unless of course Moray Council has had no regard for human rights in it's activities.
2. Information will be required to be reported in any event. This will require a manual review of case files anyway as you assert that you are unable to provide any information.
This undermines the argument that a manual review of case files causes the cost threshold to be exceeded. The cost of collating this information is largely met by complying with your statistics reporting duties.
It is not fair, therefore, to consider that the cost of this work can be attributed to the Freedom of Information Act request to such an extent as you suggest because providing the information is simply a case of bringing forward an already required exercise and further investigation of those case files at the same time substantially reduces the cost averred by your local authority.
The fact that your response is issued within such close proximity to the deadline for a response to be issued, without any valid clarification request, is also indicative of the refusal being related to the fact that you have run out of time. Whilst you do have 20 working days from the day after the Freedom of Information Act request is received to reply, to take nearly 20 days to send what is largely a template letter is indicative of this response being used a convenient opt-out for compliance with the FOIA.
Response 20-06-2024
Following your request for a review (our ref: 101003574617) of your Freedom of Information (FOI) Request - Safeguarding Statistics 10100355747, a review meeting was held on 12th June 2024. In attendance were the Information Governance Manager and Data Protection Officer, Social Work Service Manager, Solicitor, and Information Co-ordinator.
Your FOI Request from 25th April 2024 was discussed.
We reviewed our response of 22nd May 2024, including the application of exemption Section 12 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, excessive cost.
Regarding the first point of your review request, it was found that even if we erred on the side of caution in terms of the time required to provide a response to your FOI request, it was still anticipated that the statutory threshold of £600 would be exceeded. This figure is calculated by dividing the threshold of £600 by the maximum wage per hour as per FOISA = £15, and that would allow up to 40 hours of work to be done in connection with an FOI request.
A team of Social work staff looked into just one of your 40 questions and found that three hours were spent on trying to collate data for that - this was solely regarding children's services. It can be assumed that this could be doubled if the information for vulnerable adults and older people for this question was included, with further time being required for Justice Services. It was therefore decided that this FOI would meet the threshold for exemption under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, and the Panel confirmed that the application of the exemption previously was upheld.
In addition, a further review found that some of the legislation you quote is not applicable in Scotland, and that the procedures that are followed by our teams around safeguarding are different from what is assumed in your request.
The Council does have a duty to report some data to Scottish Government, as such and in order to be helpful, those links to children’s social work statistical data were supplied. The Panel were pleased to see that the Council had shared these to be helpful.
Regarding your second point that case files get reviewed anyway and, by supplying all the information requested in your FOI request, the Council could save time and money, the panel found that such case file reviews are carefully planned for and are not required for all of the cases held. Due to the significant workload Social Work teams are routinely subject to, any review exercise must be carefully scheduled, and it would be impractical to change timings in order to align with an FOI request, in particular with the statutory deadlines of a FOI Request.
Regarding the response having been issued close to the statutory deadline: we would like to confirm that, even though the Children and Families Social Work and Adult Social Care teams are extremely busy, a significant amount of preparatory work is necessary prior to sending out a FOI request response, especially as the application of an exemption such as Section 12 is discussed and confirmed by both the department and the Information Governance Manager before applied. The Panel would like to reassure the requestor that it takes the application of any such exemption seriously and that consideration of an exemption is considered and not rushed.
The Panel confirms that the application of Section 12 was correctly applied and hopes these further explanations help the requestor appreciate the Council’s efforts.