Agenda item - Member Involvement

To consider the following matters raised by councillors:

(a)         Petitions: to receive any petitions submitted to the full Council or at the meeting itself;

(b)         Written Questions: to consider any written questions;

(c)         Letters: to consider any letters;

(1)          Freedom of Information requests- Councillor Meadows

(d)       Notices of Motion: to consider any Notices of Motion referred from Council or submitted directly to the Committee.

(C)      MEMBERS LETTERS

(1)          Freedom of Information Requests

6.1         The Committee considered a Letter from Councillor Meadows requesting a report detailing key statistics relating to Freedom of Information requests and that report to propose resolutions to any issues uncovered.

6.2         The Chair provided the following response:

“In this year’s KPI’s that will be reported to P&R committee there is a new performance indicator on FOI compliance. The first time this will be reported to committee is in December. In addition, there have been other requests for councillor briefings on FOI performance, including one from the cross party KPI member working group. This means a briefing will be presented in the near future to our Information Governance Board, and subsequently to all councillors.

There are some changes being considered in the team structure that will improve FOI performance, and it may be more useful for these changes to be implemented, for the planned all councillor briefing to take place, and then for a report to be brought to A&S’s later in the year. This sequence of events will provide more information on the future direction of travel, how performance is being improved and also will be easier to manage from a workload point of view. We’ve got Item 14 on the agenda which is to consider items for future meetings so we can pick up our response to this Letter there”.

6.3         RESOLVED- That the Committee note the Letter.