Increasing numbers of combined FOI teams across public authorities

[kingqueen3065]

There is an increasing trend of authorities pooling their information governance teams, presumably to save money. For example in Dorset, West Dorset District Council, Weymouth and Portland Borough Council and North Dorset District Council share staff in a shared services partnership. So the same staff process requests for the three councils.

This can make requests via our service confusing, as where the same request is made to all three authorities, they tend to send one combined response to one of the request addresses. This doesn't fit well with our system.

As this circumstance is probably going to continue increasing in frequency over time, it would be great if we could adjust our system in some way to deal with this.

I hesitate to suggest another option in request classification options, as there are always going to be situations that don't fit the classifications and we don't want too many, but would that be a good idea? A way for admins, or users, to link requests together other than fudging through giving one a false "withdrawn" categorisation and giving a link to the other in an annotation? Or something else?

[RichardTaylor]

This often happens with NHS bodies too.

I think this is a problem for the public bodies really rather than us.

We've already got annotations we can use to link between requests and note if a response has been provided elsewhere.

I'm happy marking a request thread as successful if there's an annotation on it pointing to where the response has been supplied on another thread.

#34 might help here but I don't think there's a pressing need to go further.

[kingqueen3065]

If we are proposing to do nothing on the basis that each body has individual FOI responsibilities irrespective of whether they share information governance teams with another body or not, which to me sounds correct, then perhaps we could or should include a note in the FOI officers' help text on our site, explaining this and recommending that authorities send responses to both / all request addresses if they've written a combined response.

[crowbot]

@kingqueen3065 @RichardTaylor happy to add some text to the FOI officers' help if you can supply a draft.

[garethrees]

Going to close this as its not something we can do much about. If we want to add extra help text, best bet is to create an issue in https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/

[RichardTaylor]

A special annotation (#34) describing a link to another request thread where a response can be found might help in cases like this.