Despite a major improvement from the previous year, Westmorland and Furness Council failed to hit its Freedom of Information (FOI) compliance target for 2024/25.
According to a recently released report, the council received 1,427 FOI requests in 2024/25 and responded to 1,135 within the 20 working days target window.
This means that 79.5 per cent of requests were answered in time, below its target of 90 per cent.
A FOI request is a request made under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) to a public body for unpublished information.
The body in question generally must fulfil the request to the best of its ability within 20 working days
Enviornmental Information Regulations (EIRs) are a sub-request used for enviornmental information. Some of the above numbers were EIRs.
Despite failing to meet its FOI target, the council surpassed its performance in the previous year by a wide margin.
In 2023/24, the council received 1694 FOI requests and responded to 881 of them in time.
This is only 52 per cent of responses.
During a meeting held on September 12, the senior council officer Paul Robinson called the 2023/24 performance “just not acceptable”.
He said the improvement in performance was doing to “training and development” and that the council “upped efficiency, not capacity”.
This was praised as a “dramatic reversal” by councillor Hilary Carrick.
The document reads: “After a poor start to the year where only 44% of FOIs were processed in time in April 2024, significant improvement was delivered and the year-end performance of 79.53% (and significantly higher performance in Q4) resulted in the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) being satisfied that new controls and performance was as they expected.
“The quarter 1 performance for 2025/26 is 87%, demonstrating that improvements are embedded and improved performance achieved compared to 2024/25 year end.”
Because of the improvement the ICO, a data protection watchdog, invited the council to “demonstrate how effective leadership and action taken for a Council that has been through Local Government Reorganisation can be seen as a good practice for others to learn from.”
Additionally, 94 per cent of Data Subject Access Requests were responded to in time, this surpassed its target of 75 per cent.
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