Section 14 of the Freedom of Information Act

I have been a very busy boy.  I didn't realise until I had a nice chat with Kerry from Flintshire County Council.  In case you don't know her, she is a really nice lady and in charge of the FoI department in Flintshire.  She basically coordinates the FoI Department and makes sure that they get the information. So she is the one that I have been getting all of the information from.  

You see when you are asking a FoI request, you are asking something of which requires maximum of 18 hours of work from someone. For arguments sake, lets say I put in 30 requests.  Thats a maximum of 540 hours work, or to put it another way 22 and a half days work.  Thats a lot of time for a department and a lot of work.  

And that is where Kerry comes in. You see I have made a RECORD month for FoI requests in Flintshire (Her words, not mine).  On Thursday I received an email from Kerry saying that there was a problem with some of my requests and that they would like to talk to me.  So I phoned her this morning.  After a few technical glitches here is how the conversation went (Roughly - Sorry Kerry if this has some dramatic licence to it).  The parts in Italic are Kerry:

“How many more FoI requests are you going to send?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because of the volume of FoI request you have made, we are under strain here”

“Err…  Sorry..”

“That’s ok but we are tempted to use section 14 of the FoI act.  You are not there yet  but you have sent in a lot of FoI requests to us”

***Pause***

“Whats section 14 all about?”

And so I was briefed.  As I have discovered, if you send in a large volume (As Kerry gave the example of 50 at one time), you can get denied the request as it is causing a LOT of problems.  It is a way of making sure that you are not tying up all the resources on  FoI requests.

At the end of the day, as stated in a few blogs back, the councils have a lot of money to spend on a lot of issues.  You cannot just tie them up on requests all the time.  It does take time and resources away from the people in the department.  

So therefore, to all local council in wales, I will not send FoI request for the whole of march.  Because the thing that, again, until Kerry very nicely told me, they still have some FoI requests in their system which have yet to be answered.  And they are still taking time to come through.

So by way of an Apology to all FoI, please accept this video of kittens.