They work for you!

We always think that government sit on their backsides and do nothing.  Well, they don't.  They actually do a lot of hard work with a huge amount of different actions in which there is no right answer (And most times people will get offended no matter what you do). The thing is how hard do they work?  What barometer can we use to see how hard they work for us?  Well how about the FoI act?

One of the many things that I thought of asking was the following:

1. How many FoI requests did you receive in 2015
2. How many were answers within the 20-day time frame

Now, with a lot of respect too Kerry from Flintshire (Who gave me a slapped wrist for the amount that I asked), I think the numbers may be a little higher this year (Naughty Jon..)

So here are the results:

Name	Amount Asked	Amount Complete in the time Frame
Blaenau	No Answer
Bridgend	951	879
Caerphilly	No Answer
Cardiff	1549
Carmarthenshire	1033	878
Ceredigion	No Answer
Conway	959	792
Denbighshire	1045	978
Flintshire	251	233
Gwynedd	959	826
Anglesey	685	305
Merthyr Tydfil	701	681
Monmouth	No Answer
Neath Port Talbot	1004	790
Newport	878	807
Pembroke	No Answer
Powys	1163	1046
RCT	No Answer
Swansea	1123
Wrexham	No Answer
Amount	13386	9294

Percentage of FoI requests in the designated time frame is 69.43%.  That’s pretty good.  If you think about it this way; each council has to spend a maximum of 18 hours of work getting this information (about £650) to gain the information.  I should point out that this PROBABLY going to be higher as some of the councils did not get back on the amount of FoI were done within the time frame.

If we say that each FoI Request, on average, takes 9 hours to get (£325 spend) then Welsh councils spent 120,474 hours on FoI Request in 2015.  That equates to 5020 days OR over a year…  They also spent £4,350,450 on FoI requests too (this was the cost of getting the FoI together on manpower and so forth)...

Now I did ask the Welsh Government and the National Assembly of Wales to… but I lost the emails… Sorry!

Anyway, it goes to show that this law\procedure works and is taken very seriously.  Think about it.  It was a way of YOU finding out the things that  YOU wanted to know about in YOU local council.  You see, these council really do want you to work with them.  They wouldn't spend this amount of money, otherwise.. You see they work for YOU!!! (And if you use the phone app called We Queue For you, please note that I hate you…)