Freedom of Information

Under the 'right of public access' you may ask for information about our policy making process, how we balance our budget, service delivery, as well as issues which affect your quality of life. To make this easier for you we have provided wou with a named contact for these kind of requests (see below).

We welcome our responsibilities with regard to the 'Freedom of Information Act 2000' and the 'Environmental Information Regulations 2004' and support the principles within these new laws.

These two laws give you access to most of the information held by the Council subject to some exemptions (eg personal data remains protected by the Data Protection Act).

The first stage of our preparation was to prepare our publication scheme (see below) which lists the information we currently make available and by what means and includes any relevant costs. Any of this information is excluded from the Act as it is already available.

The Publication Scheme is available to download below.

Freedom of Information Requests

Month	Number of requests	Number of responses given within the time limit	Number of requests dealt with within 48 hours	Number of exemptions applied
January 2012	36	35	10	0
February 2012	40	37	22	0
March 2012	46	36	15	2
April 2012	26	25	7	0
May 2012	40	40	21	0
June 2012	38	33	11	3
July 2012	64	52	9	1
August 2012	27	23	6	0
September 2012	25	25	4	1
October 2012	41	36	9	9
November 2012	34	31	9	0
December 2012	24	21	10	0
January 2013	44	44	17	0
February 2013	45	35	15	0
March 2013	39	30	8	0