Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
COUNCILLOR PETER
CHALKE CBE, DR
LYDIA POLLARD,
FAITH BOARDMAN
AND KATH
MATLEY
19 OCTOBER 2004
Q200 Mr Soley: The Act.
Cllr Chalke: Only a very short
time before the Act comes into place we have now seen a speech
from Lord Falconer on the fees. I would remind you that we also
still do not know the fees on the Licensing Act. We have been
preparing, but if Government had prepared earlier and let us have
the information earlier it would have made life a lot easier.
Ms Boardman: I think we have had
about three problems on this. The first is a practical one, which
is the nature of a local authority's business, because we provide
something like 300 different services. The records management
is legitimately different in that it is governed by statutes between
all of those different services. I think we are peculiar in the
public service in terms of the complexity of the services that
we do and that certainly knocks on into issues like IT. We are
moving reasonably swiftly in our case from a situation where we
have had no IT in some services, very old IT in others and more
modern even further, but there is a business need which all local
authorities are tackling to join those systems up and modernize
them. That is a very big issue and takes several years. As that
comes through then I think the practical position will ease considerably.
The second issue that I think we have had in practical terms is
the understandable difficulty in getting guidance out to us. Obviously,
in terms of actually setting out the detail of the processes and
procedures and indeed the detail of the training, we do need to
have that guidance in front of us. Very often, because of the
timetable that we have been trying to follow, we have received
them when we were part-way through doing that phase of the work
and they have proved useful, but often it is as a check-list in
terms of what we have been doing rather than being there at the
start of each phase. I think those would be the practical reasons
I would flag up in addition to the fees and charges point.
Q201 Mr Soley: Can you give me an indication
about the interface between data protection and the Freedom of
Information? Secondly, is it not true to say that local authorities
over-estimated the problems of data protection and they might
be doing the same with FOI?
Ms Matley: I co-ordinate a number
of joint working groups and I have come across that point from
one or two members of the group who feel that we did prepare for
data protection and when it actually came to it there were not
as many cases. I think these will be different than data protection
[subject access] requests. Basically we have had to carry out
quite intensive training to make staff aware of how to recognise
a request, whether it is environmental information, Freedom of
Information or data protection.
Dr Pollard: With the Data Protection
Act there was a lot of preparation and a lot of investment put
into it and then very often they did not get the number of enquiries
that they thought they would get. As a result of that some authorities
have been quite cautious about how much they should invest for
Freedom of Information because we have virtually no information
about how many enquiries they are likely to get. If you are talking
of implementing an electronic records management system, you could
easily spend £250,000 on such a system. If you are a small
district authority then that is an enormous sum of money and so
before you would invest in anything like that you would need to
be sure that you were getting the right number of enquiries to
justify implementing such a system. So it has had a knock-on effect
on Freedom of Information.
Q202 Mr Soley: And the interface between
the two?
Dr Pollard: The interface to me,
personally, is quite clear.
Q203 Mr Soley: It is not a problem for
you, is it?
Dr Pollard: No.
Q204 Mr Soley: Would everybody agree
with you that there is not a great problem between the interface
and data protection?
Ms Matley: We have got to give
special training on the interface between data protection and
Freedom of Information in order to recognise that, for example,
structured files and unstructured files are different. I think
we will have to work on that and that is what we are aiming to
do. We have arranged a training session dedicated to that.
Q205 Mr Soley: For Manchester?
Ms Matley: Yes.
Q206 Chairman: The Local Government Association
made much of the resources problem and about local authorities
not having the money or personnel to tackle this, but surely that
is true of all the public bodies that have this responsibility.
Part of the argument Ms Boardman advanced, which is an interesting
one, is that there is a wider diversity about local government
services and it is greater perhaps than the health authority because
you are covering a wider range of services. Is that not the same
problem for everybody?
Cllr Chalke: Yes, but I would
have to remind you that the Deputy Prime Minister has made very
clear that local government should not have extra duties and responsibilities
without the money to follow it. I suspect that, having heard him
say that only on Friday at the Central Local Partnership, we have
now seen the benefit of that advice coming out in the announcement
yesterday from Lord Falconer, but that is only from April onwards
and we have just heard from others here that £¼ million
is the cost of the electronic records management system that is
needed. For a small local authority that is a large part of their
budget and we have the setup costs which have been considerable
over the three years and the initial start costs will not be covered
by that extra grant which is available from April onwards. So
we will be asking authorities to tell us what it has cost with
a view to giving that evidence to the ODPM for a reflection in
some reimbursement of the funding that we have incurred so far.
Q207 Chairman: Could a small local authority
not reach its requests without a new records management system,
however desirable that might be and have access to their records
in the normal course of enquiries they receive from the public?
Surely the lack of an electronic records management system should
not prevent them from having access to files they have to use
in any case.
Cllr Chalke: Electronic e-government
is an expensive proposition. I know my authority has spent millions
of pounds in order to be able to do their business electronically
more effectively. When you are very short of money and you are
looking at social services and overspends on social services,
education and such things, it is very hard to go to the public
and say we are going to spend £7 million on an electronic
system. You do not get much sympathy for that. There have been
some grants from Government to get it started. We are all doing
that investment over a fairly long period. This has brought it
to a head, the fact that there may be an urgent need if there
is a high volume of requests for information and they may need
to bring forward those plans and spend more money in the shorter
term than we expected.
Q208 Chairman: I was thinking of a small
district like Dr Pollard mentioned where I recognise it would
be a very big capital investment. The quantity of records is smaller
and the degree of familiarity with those records should be greater.
Dr Pollard: You have still got
the range of services. The issue is whether you are going across
a range of services. It may be possible for them to do it. We
do not know how many enquiries under FOI they are going to get
and that is a big question. If they only get a few then they should
be able to do it. If they are inundated with requests then they
will not be able to cope with manual systems. A lot of them have
held off to see whether they need it. The Code of Practice implies
that they should have a records management system as well. There
is an implication that in order to comply with Freedom of Information
you should have an electronic records management system, but in
practice they may be able to get away without it. Until they know
the level of enquiries that they are going to get it is very difficult
to say.
Q209 Ross Cranston: May I come back to
the question of fees that Councillor Chalke raised. I take the
point that it is only yesterday that we got the figures, but I
am just wondering whether this is really the same as licensing.
My borough council needs to know whether it is going to get a
couple more enforcement officers to go out and do the work, so
fees are quite important there, but here you have had to do the
work in any event and so fees are not really determinative. Is
that a correct assessment?
Cllr Chalke: Yes.
Q210 Ross Cranston: How is the guidance
going to help? Is it going to determine how you do the work?
Cllr Chalke: No, but it is symptomatic
of the way we are being prepared. Very often the information we
need has not been forthcoming as quickly as we may have wanted
it. We do have to prepare ourselves as part of this for a charging
regime. For us not to know until a few weeks before what that
charging regime is to be able to set up a system of collecting
the charges is unnecessary because it could have been announced
months ago.
Q211 Ross Cranston: I take that point.
Were you really relying on the fact that you had been able to
charge for work that would have cost more than £50 as opposed
to the figure that they have now chosen, which I think for you
is £450, is it not?
Cllr Chalke: That is right.
Q212 Ross Cranston: Were you relying
on that in terms of your plan?
Cllr Chalke: In our preparation
we need to know what we are going to be able to receive in income
from this. The fact that it is acknowledged that there may be
cases over £450 I think acknowledges that there may be many
cases which are close to that and that is a considerable expense
to local government. We are reassured that we are going to be
reimbursed for that, but I wonder whether anyone has done the
calculations as to how much money that does entail.
Ms Boardman: Until we know the
level of demand it is actually very difficult to answer your question
properly. There are a couple of issues to mention. There is the
amount which we have already invested, which is now sunk cost,
which I think would take a great deal of demand in order to recoup.
Let me give you an idea of that in our case. We have had a 16
person project team working on this for three years. Three members
of that project team have been full time and for some of the others
it has been a substantial part, though only on a part-time basis,
of their duties. We have had to train 4,500 staff. The opportunity
cost of that in terms of taking them away from their normal duties
is probably the equivalent of something like 10 or 12 man-years
in the run up to the introduction of this and there will obviously
be ongoing training costs.
Q213 Chairman: Are you talking about
one authority?
Ms Boardman: Yes. We then also
needed to take full cognisance of this, as we have been doing,
in our IT. In the main we have tried to minimise the additional
cost on that because we did start this three years ago, at a time
when we were beginning to put serious investment into the e-government
agenda and it is one which Lambeth is actually very keen on in
business terms and service terms and it has been a high priority
for us. We have probably spent certainly an additional £200,000
or so over and above what we would have done for business and
services reasons and if you were starting more from scratch then
obviously it would have been bigger. All those are sunk costs
which I am not clear are being taken account of in this announcement,
though I have not had the benefit of looking at it in full.
Ross Cranston: I am not sure that we
are able to understand it either. There is a separate point in
that under section 13 of the Act it says that if the cost is beyond
a certain amount the regulations could provide that you do not
have to provide the information. I am wondering whether the £600
is actually that figure where this provision kicks in. So we are
puzzled by that. I accept the point about sunk costs.
Q214 Chairman: Surely you cannot have
assumed at any stage that the income from fees would be significant
given that there was going to be either a low fee or no fee for
some of the most common types of inquiry and given what you have
said to us several times, you could have no idea how many requests
you were going to get and so it was not safe to make any assumptions
about income from fees, was it?
Dr Pollard: One of the issues
about not having information about the charges actually relates
to setting up your procedures for handling the enquiries and also
the training of staff. If the fee was set at something like £10,
as under the Data Protection Act, most authorities would not bother
to charge for that, it is not worth their while, but if you are
allowed to charge more than that then it becomes more worthwhile,
but then you have to set in place procedures for collecting that
money and also training staff so that they know when to ask for
the money and there are also things like the clock stops ticking
until you have received the money, so it has a whole lot of issues
related to training. That is one of the issues to do with the
lateness of the information about charging, it is not just about
recovering the costs.
Ms Boardman: At this stage we
have largely completed our training and this will be an additional
thing which we will have to go back on.
Q215 Keith Vaz: What practical guidance
would your members have liked to have received that they have
not received?
Ms Matley: We would have liked
more guidance aimed specifically at local government, we would
have liked more guidance on Schedule 12(a) of the Local Government
Act 1972 and obviously more guidance on fees.
Q216 Chairman: Can you just explain the
point about section 12(a)?
Ms Matley: Consultation is going
on at the moment on this and obviously it affects the local authorities
in that there are 15 exemptions within Schedule 12(a) which affect
local government and they are affected now by the Freedom of Information
Act. The consultation is quite late on this.
Q217 Keith Vaz: What sort of training
do you think the DCA or the ICO should have given?
Ms Matley: The training that we
have given within Greater Manchester has basically been in-house
training. We have purchased e-learning packages and we have continued
with in-house training based on the guidance that we have had
from the DCA and from the Information Commissioner's Office.
Q218 Keith Vaz: So the packages are from
whom?
Ms Matley: We have purchased them
as a consortium from a private company because we could not wait
for an e-learning package to come out from the Government. So
we are pretty well advanced with our training. We began with cascade
training very early on. As a consortium we have had the e-learning
package and now we are into in-depth training for those people
who will take the decisions, which is obviously based on the exemptions,
and we need to bring the fees into that training.
Q219 Keith Vaz: Dr Pollard?
Dr Pollard: In terms of guidance,
the comments that I have had back from a number of authorities
have been that the guidance that has been provided tends to be
at a high level and too legalistic. They would have liked something
that is in plain English and more directional as well, something
telling authorities specifically what they need to do, almost
a step-by-step guidance to implementing Freedom of Information.
I believe that in the NHS, for example, PCTs were given a lot
of very specific guidance and something like that would have helped
for district councils, particularly where they do not have specialist
staff and to get up to speed does take some time.
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