Data protection and freedom of information

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
August 2009	18	15	8	n/a
September 2009	18	12	6	1
October 2009	17	11	4	n/a
November 2009	21	20	8	1
December 2009	23	19	10	n/a
January 2010	31	26	15	n/a
February 2010	24	20	10	n/a
March 2010	18	10	8	n/a
April 2010	26	20	4	n/a
May 2010	20	15	8	n/a
June 2010	32	20	9	n/a
July 2010	28	19	4	n/a
August 2010	25	21	11	n/a
September 2010	19	14	1	n/a
October 2010	22	18	7	n/a
November 2010	38	26	11	n/a
December 2010	20	9	2	n/a
January 2011	36	33	8	1
February 2011	47	42	15	1
March 2011	30	26	4	n/a
April 2011	29	24	7	1
May 2011	43	40	9	n/a
June 2011	36	34	7	n/a
July 2011	32	27	4	1
August 2011	44	40	11	n/a
September 2011	32	28	5	n/a
October 2011	35	34	14	n/a
November 2011	52	41	8	2
December 2011	15	14	6	0