Jacob Williams https://jacobwilliams.com

Following the county council’s eleventh hour decision to pull its controversial Civic Amenity Site application from the National Park’s planning agenda last month, I submitted a Freedom of Information request each to Pembrokeshire County Council, and to the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.

I asked for copies and records of correspondence between relevant officers at each authority, in-between the date on which the National Park’s recommendation for refusal of the plans was published, and the point at which the council withdrew its application.

The National Park promptly obliged, complying within only four working days, a satisfactory outcome by any standard. As I write, I am yet to receive the council’s disclosure, only a holding message telling me that my request is being ‘considered’ and should be dealt within the ‘statutory timescale of 20 working days,’ by the 17th of July.

The county council seems to dislike the privilege bestowed on citizens to gain access to information, and waiting right until the end of the compliance timescale before disclosing the requested information isn’t so much a consequence of other factors, it’s the council’s standard practise – in other words, because the law says ‘20 working days,’ very often, as much of it is used as possible.

Rather like the council’s decision to withdraw the application from the National Park’s agenda, procrastination seems to be key where FoI requests are concerned. I speak with only limited personal experience on the topic, but many others I have spoken to on the matter can relate to it too. Members of the public who wish to submit an FoI request, can do so through the ‘What Do They Know?’ website, rather than emailing or applying in writing. One of the unique features of submitting a request in this way, is that, instead of being sent privately to the requester individually, disclosures in response to requests submitted though that website are automatically placed online for all and sundry to read at their leisure. Pembrokeshire County Council’s list of requests can be accessed here, and it is well worth reading through:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/pembrokeshire_council

You’ll notice that, whilst some of the requests submitted through that website are fulfilled within a timely manner, on many occasions, disclosures are published on the final day of the compliance period or with only a handful of days to spare. Though this source is hardly representative of FoI requests sent to the council for many reasons. Mainly because the council will know that any request submitted through ‘What Do They Know’ will be published to an unlimited audience to browse online, and also, because a person or media outlet wishing to uncover something exclusively, would be more likely to submit their request privately, rather than through a website where anybody else could use the disclosed information to ‘beat them to the scoop’!

Including today, the 12th July, there are three working days left for the council to provide me with the information I have requested, or to tell me that the information is either exempt, or that more time is needed to decide whether the disclosure of the information is within the public interest.

Even though it’s a more transparent organisation, with a disclosure of similar information having already been provided to me by PCNP, it would be difficult to see how the council could argue that the disclosure is not within the public interest or is exempt; so I fail to see why it needs so much longer than PCNP to comply – and still with no disclosure in sight.

But, I think I know the answer. It’s to be awkward. Pembrokeshire Coast National Park upholds the principles behind access to information, and Pembrokeshire County Council unfortunately does not. Waiting until the end of the twenty working days to disclose information that is surely only a mouse’s click away from being shared, is nothing more than peskiness, and Pembrokeshire County Council’s line of pen-pushing-peskiness is unsurpassed.

This disobliging attitude is perfectly lawful, you might think. However, the authority’s trained lawyers might do well to thumb through their dusty law books.

They might be in for a surprise. Rather than upholding the authority’s entitlement to be sluggish in coming to provide disclosures, the legislation rather helpfully comes down on the side of promptitude.

This quoted section from section 10 (1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, sets out the issue of timing quite nicely:

10 Time for compliance with request.

(1) Subject to subsections (2) and (3), a public authority must comply with section 1(1) promptly and in any event not later than the twentieth working day following the date of receipt.

(My emphasis in bold)

I feel it’s worth putting on record at this opportunity, that the same legislation also allows a body to refuse requests for ‘Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant…by other means.’ For instance, if I sent an FoI request asking how much the toll charge is for a car to pass the Cleddau Bridge, the council would be entitled to refuse the request and instead direct me to the place where the information is freely available.

As any disclosure provided by any organisation from an FoI request automatically places that information into the public domain, if I was being ultra-cynical, the council could now take the view that, as the National Park has complied with a similar FoI request of mine, there is no need for my request to be processed as the information is already in the public domain.

But that would take the pen-pushing-peskiness to a whole new level.