Reading council’s ‘rubbish’ record of responding to information requests from the public has been grilled at a recent meeting.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests were introduced in 2000 which gives the public a right to access information held by public authorities such as councils, police forces and the government.

Although public authorities are legally required to respond to at least 90 per cent of FOIs within 20 working days, Reading Borough Council has fallen well short of that.

At an Audit and Governance Committee meeting, members received a report on the council’s recent FOI response rate.

But things got off to an odd start due to a numerical error in the report as acknowledged at the meeting.

Of the 289 FOIs filed in Quarter One of 2022/23 (April to June 2022), 182 were answered within the 20 working day period.

That is 63 per cent compliance, not the 58.1 per cent recorded in the report.

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Michael Graham, the council’s assistant director legal and democratic services admitted the response times are ‘disappointingly and stubbornly low’.

Adding: “It’s still rubbish.”

That means that 107 (37 per cent) of FOIs were not responded to in the required 20 working day period.

This failure to respond in the required timeframes has led Caversham resident Jason Collie to file a formal complaint about the council to the Information Commissioners Office.

Previously Mr Collie found Reading Borough Council received 1,451 FOIs in 2018/19 and did not respond in full to 380, or 26 per cent, within 20 working days.

READ MORE: Council slammed for lack of 'transparency' as delay to information requests worsen

More recently, in 2019/20, the council received 1,330 requests and failed to respond to 335 on time, or 25 per cent, an improvement of one per cent.

Mr Graham blamed the work ‘culture’ at the council for the slow response times.

That was in a response to a question from councillor Josh Williams, chairman of the committee.

Cllr Williams (Green, Park) said: “I think this has been going on for a couple of years now, pre-covid.

“Do you have a sense of what the problem is we’re trying to fix here? It’s not just looking at numbers.

“What’s causing those, and how will the plan hit that root reason?”

Mr Graham replied: “We believe it’s cultural. People are busy in their day jobs, they’ve got vacancies in services, there are some real pressures out there.

“FOIs complaints, councillor enquiries, all those things which are really important, information rights are perhaps viewed as something else which they’ve got to do and there’s a deadline to do it, and that’s the nut we’ve got to crack.”

While Mr Graham did say that changes to structure, teamworking, software and policies recommended in 2019 have been undertaken, he conceded these changes “haven’t made any impact”.

Mr Graham’s department will devise an action plan which involves improving communications and make sure FOIs are received by the correct council officers to deal with.

This plan will be worked on in Q4 (Oct-Dec 2022) and be presented to the audit and governance committee in January.

The committee noted the report and agreed to the action plan at the meeting yesterday (Wednesday, September 28).