Councils spent more than £30m responding to almost 200,000 Freedom of Information requests last year, the Local Government Association has revealed.
The group, which represents councils in England and Wales, has also published some of this year’s unusual FoI requests. Dealing with these can impact taxpayers’ value for money, the group has said.These requests included a resident asking Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service what plans are in place to deal with an alien invasion. Cheltenham Borough Council was quizzed on whether they had made preparations for Santa making a crash landing in the borough this Christmas.
LGA improvement board chair Peter Fleming said that local authorities are now the most transparent part of the public sector. The number of FoI requests sent to local authorities has more than doubled since 2007, according to latest research from the Constitution Unit at the University of Central London.
Fleming added: ‘Across
the country, hundreds of Freedom of Information requests are sent to local
authorities every day. Councils are committed to transparency and
accountability and put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that legitimate
requests for information are met with full and comprehensive responses.
‘However, as this list shows, some of the requests councils receive do not appear to relate very closely to the services they are focused on delivering every day of the year.’
Public bodies can refuse a request if it is considered to be vexatious, it would cost too much to comply or if the information is exempt from disclosure.
