Whitby Town Council tells committee to consider hiring more staff to deal with ‘frivolous’ FoI requests

Whitby Town Councillors have supported a motion calling for more staff to be hired to help cope with a “significant increase” in Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, according to Coun Linda Wild.

Coun Wild, who proposed the motion, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the meeting on Tuesday, September 5 “passed the motion and referred it to the council’s human resources committee, with a clear message to think about its duty to its staff”.

She said the council should cut out “low-value tasks” and “frivolous requests” so that staff could focus on “serving the people”.

The FOI Act allows public access to information held by public authorities by requiring them to publish certain information about their work whilst members of the public are also entitled to request information.

According to the law, public authorities should respond to FOI requests within 20 working days but they can be turned down if it would cost too much or take too much staff time to deal with the request.

The councillor said that the authority currently only has one and a half members of staff who handle the requests which she said can take “between four and 18 hours per instance to process,” with a single hour of additional work each week equalling “1.6 per cent of the administrative team’s capacity”.

Coun Wild said: “The [HR] committee will work together with the staff to find ways to handle external and internal requests efficiently.”

She added: “Members were eager to cut out low-value tasks and manage frivolous requests so that the staff can focus on Whitby’s core activities and serving the people.”

The motion, which was seconded by Coun John Nock, proposed: “That Whitby Town Council employs an additional member of staff for 10 hours per week to answer requests under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Data Protection Act 2018, since the council has seen a significant increase in these.”

Coun Wild, who is chair of Whitby Town Council’s finance, policy and general purpose committee, estimated that hiring a part-time member of staff would cost the council “in the region of £7,300 at minimum wage, including statutory overheads”.