£394,490 – the cost of being open

FREEDOM of Information requests cost Warrington Borough Council a staggering £394,490 last year – an average of £515 per request.
But this figure is a 10 per cent reduction on the previous year when the total cost was £438,780 – a saving of £44,290.
Council chiefs hope to reduce the cost still further – by being more transparent and open and publishing as much information as possible on the council website www.warrington.gov.uk
Cllr Hitesh Patel, the council’s executive member for personnel and communications said: “In the past we have had some ridiculous FOI requests, for example, ‘What is the Council’s contingency plans if the world stopped spinning?’
“We still get a lot of requests from the media, lobbying groups, researchers, etc, so I am urging people to help us not waste money and instead I ask them to be proactive and use our website and the various government statistics websites to find the information they seek.”
Cllr Patel said the Freedom of Information Act came into force in 2005, but the Lib Dem-Conservative administration running the council at the time did not introduce any monitoring until July 2010.
Even then it was “very basic and disorganised.”
He said: When Labour took control in May 2011 we instructed officers to create more robust monitoring protocols and to start looking at the cost of this service in more detail.
“We also set about publishing as much information as possible on our website, as per national guidance, in the hope that by being more transparent and open, people would not need to put in as many FOI requests.
“In 2011-12, the first full year of FOI monitoring, the council received 852 FOI requests which cost us approximately £438,780 to deal with. However, as a direct result of this Labour administration’s drive to be more open and transparent by publishing more information on our website, this was reduced to 766 FOI requests last year.
“Whilst this still cost us approximately £394,490 to deal with, it was a massive 10 per cent reduction, saving us £44,290.”
The council accepts that the cost of dealing with FOIs is just part of being in an open and transparent democracy.
However given that government cuts have slashed Warrington’s funding by some £50 million and many of the council’s traditional services are having to be scaled back, many councillors are now saying that more needs to be done to reduce the burden of dealing with FOIs.
Cllr Patel added: “We have set a target of reducing this cost by a further 10 per cent in the current financial year and we are looking to publish even more information on our website. Over the next few months we will also instruct council officers to review how we respond to FOI requests, especially those that cost much more than the statutory limit of £450 to deal with.”