COUNCIL HOARDING F.O.I SECRETS

By Phil Intray

IF you dared to keep your local Clowncil waiting MONTHS for your Council Tax payment you could expect to receive its full bureaucratic force.

There would be endless “urgent” letters from your Town Hall followed by visits from skin-headed bailiffs and finally court summonses to explain yourself before the local beak.

In the very worst cases, you could expect to spend some time at His Majesty’s Pleasure for non-payment, or a postponed prison sentence – providing you promised to cough up.

Yet when the shoe is on the other foot and your Council takes an age to respond to Joe Public, there are no such courses of redress!

As has been illustrated by events at the secretive Crumberland Council, which rules the roost over the People’s Republic of North and West Kumbria.

Taxpayers submitting Freedom of Information requests to the Labour-run council should generally get a response within 20 days.

Yet as 2025 starts, the Council is still sitting on a smelly pile of overdue FOIs dating all the way back to 2023.

The Council’s response rate to FOIs has also been flashing “red” for 16 consecutive months (meaning there are significant concerns about it missing deadlines).

And its inability to speedily answer legitimate questions about its affairs puts the Council below the legal target.

These failures have already caught the eye of the ICO, the nation’s timid information watchdog.

Predictably, the Information Commissioner’s Office wimped out rather than taking robust regulatory action against the Council.

And despite the attention of the ICO, the Council only upped its FOI output by a snail-like 2.6% when compared to the same quarter last year.

To explain the delays, the Council continues to parrot its favourite excuse – Local Government Disorganisation.

The Council seems to be suggesting that the FOI backlog is caused because of the shake-up of everybody’s jobs with four councils merged into one.

(Headless chickens spring to mind.)

Most chillingly of all, Council departments and officers are “consistently failing to respond to requests” from its own internal team, which acts as the go-between the public and Council managers.

(If Council managers won’t even reply to messages from fellow staff what chance does the public have?)

Like many of our bloated public institutions, high-ranking Council commissars like to work strictly at their own pace and to their own set of priorities.

Answering annoying questions from the taxpayer has never featured highly on that list.

Next week, Council managers will explain away their failures to nodding dog Labour Councillors.

The FOI backlog problem is back on the agenda at the Council’s red-led executive meeting – its first of 2025.

Refreshed Council directors are finally returning to committee business on Tuesday 7th January – having been on holiday for Christmas and New Year.

In the Private sector, the Christmas period would have been spent clearing the FOI backlog.

In the Public sector, this is impossible.

With so many Council bosses off on annual leave, there would have been none at their desks to help answer the questions posed by the public way back in 2023.

It is piss-taking as an art form!