Freedom of Information Correspondence

Freedom of Information Correspondence

Correspondence Between Brent's Chief Executive, Gareth Daniel & Paul Burns

Only those parts of the correspondence pertaining to Freedom of Information appear here.

"As a Council we place great store by dealing with complaints in a positive and open way, and by using them to inform future service improvement." Gareth Daniel 11 August 2003, in reply to first Stage 3 Complaint about Vale Farm.

Second Stage Three Complaint Letter from Paul Burns 30 November 2003

Appendix - Further Information Sought from Brent Council

1. A copy of the Best Value Performance Plan that relates to Vale Farm (referred to in the summary of your letter of 11 August).

2. Specification for cleaning that you said would be made available to me in your letter of August 11^th. (I have only realised today that I still have not received this.) If the specification has changed since August I would like to see any amended versions.

3. A list of dates on which the pool has been vacuumed over the last four months.

4. A copy of the results of the Customer Survey undertaken at Vale Farm two months ago.

5. Information on any financial penalties Leisure Connections have paid this year for failing to meet specified standards at Vale Farm. How many times, for what failures and how much?

6. Information on cleaning standards for Leisure Centre and pools as prescribed by independent, professional bodies.

Information on the proportion of Leisure Connection Duty Managers at Vale Farm with qualifications in Sports Management or Management. What is the minimum amount of safety training people complete before they become or act up as Duty Managers?

Chief Executive's Response 26 February 2004

1. I have explained that there is no Best Value Performance Plan that I can send you. (Earlier in his letter the CE said the review was underway.)

2. The current cleaning specification will be sent to you separately. (It was sent to me in a letter dated 8 March, but curiously contained a fax dated 10 March. Even though it is only about frequency and not about standards, the schedule is one of the best pieces of fiction I have read in some time. PB)

3. I have dealt with the dates of pool vacuuming above. (He reports that according to LC the vacuuming took place once a week until the machine broke down. More fiction as far as I am concerned. If anyone doesn't believe me I will go through my l complaints to count the number of Saturday morning that I have complained about debris in the pool.)

4. The data from the customer satisfaction survey carried out towards the end of last year has only just been analysed. This survey was commissioned as part of the Best Value Review and I believe that it would be premature to provide it to you, given it has not been considered by the Review team. (Three weeks later results from the survey feature in the Brent Draft Sports Strategy, which is available from Brent's website. This document is more specific about when the survey took place, October 2003.)

5. I have dealt with the issue of financial penalties elsewhere in the letter. ("Partly because of the admittedly weak contract monitoring in the past, and partly through a desire to work in partnership rather than conflict with external contractors, financial penalties have not been imposed.")

6. You ask about cleaning standards prescribed by professional bodies. However, the current contract makes no reference to any such external guidance as to cleaning standards and so I do not consider it appropriate to go into what might be put forward as best practice. Again the contract specification is subject to review and cleaning is an important aspect which needs to be addressed.

7. It would not be appropriate for me to provide information about the qualifications of staff employed at Vale Farm or the staff turnover rates. However, Human resources will be one issues covered in the best value review. I am not sure what you mean by safety training. The contract includes provision of various forms of safety training for all staff and specifically any duty manager must be suitably qualified with a minimum qualification of the Certificate in Leisure Management and two years operational experience.

Response from Paul Burns 8 March 2003

I note that you deny me access to the customer survey at this point in time. Please provide me with a target date by which I will be able to see it.

Response by Chief Executive 4 May 2004

I am sorry it has not been possible to let you have the outcome of the customer survey as yet. The results have been discussed with Leisure Connection and the key issues highlighted. The Business Managers at the Charteris and Vale farm centres will be presenting service improvement plans at the next client/contractor meeting. It would be premature to make the findings more widely available before then. However, towards the end of May the Sports Service will be producing a newsletter outlining the key outcomes of the survey and I have asked Gary Kiefer, Head of the Sports Service, to send you a copy as soon as it is available.

As of June 8th I have not received the newsletter. Seven full months have passed since customers were surveyed almost three since it was cited in the Draft Sports Strategy and still I am not allowed to see the full report.

Response by Paul Burns 15 May 2004

You state that records of contract monitoring meetings cannot be made public. Please advise me if this still will be the case in 2005 when the new Freedom of Information Act comes into effect? I also would like to know what council papers relating to the management and letting of leisure contracts are available for viewing now and what will be available next year.

Under the new Act will I be able to see more than the summary of Vale Farm Customer Survey results. You refer to seeing key outcomes but I would much prefer to see the detailed results. What reasons are there for denying users of the service access to fuller reports on findings?

I am happy for this part of your reply to be delegated to a Council officer with expertise in the new Act and to discuss the matters with him or her.

Response from Chief Executive 3 June 2004

As you know the Freedom of Information Act does not come into force until 2005. The Council is of course preparing to meet the requirements of the Act in the light of government guidance. I do not consider it appropriate, or an efficient use of officers’ time, to try to anticipate which information we would have to provide under the Act. If you put requests for information to the Council when the Act is in force then, naturally, we would act in line with our statutory responsibilities. There are, however, various exemptions when information does not have to be provided. Such circumstances include information provided in confidence and relating to commercial interests and trade secrets. These might be relevant considerations in relation to your requests.

In the meanwhile I remain of the opinion that it would not be appropriate to provide you with details of Leisure Connection’s contract, or the Council’s monitoring of that contract.

Turning to your request to see the full customer survey results, it seems entirely reasonable for the Council to discuss the key findings first with Leisure Connection. The results will then be made publicly available on the Sports Service’s area of the Environmental Services website.

In the meanwhile Environmental Services carry out regular customer satisfaction surveys, the results of which are already available on the website.

Response from Paul Burns 7 June 2004

Dear Gareth Daniel, Thank you for your letter of 3 June in response to my request on May 15 for further information, following your reply to my stage 3 complaint in November of last year.

I will reply to other matters later but here wish to comment on your remarks about Freedom Of Information. My letter of May 15 included the following under that heading.

You state that records of contract monitoring meetings cannot be made public. Please advise me if this still will be the case in 2005 when the new Freedom of Information Act comes into effect? I also would like to know what council papers relating to the management and letting of leisure contracts are available for viewing now and what will be available next year.

Under the new Act will I be able to see more than the summary of Vale Farm Customer Survey results. You refer to seeing key outcomes but I would much prefer to see the detailed results. What reasons are there for denying users of the service access to fuller reports on findings?

I am happy for this part of your reply to be delegated to a Council officer with expertise in the new Act and to discuss the matters with him or her.

Below are your reply and my comments in blue beneath them.

As you know the Freedom of Information Act does not come into force until 2005. The Council is of course preparing to meet the requirements of the Act in the light of government guidance.

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 comes into full force in six months. In the Lord Chancellor's 2001 Annual Report on the implementation of the Act he said that it is "challenged with the task of reversing the working premise that everything is secret, unless otherwise stated, to a position where everything is public unless it falls into specified excepted cases" While the full entitlement of the Act is not yet an obligation is there any legal impediment that stops Councils now being as open as the Act will require?

I do not consider it appropriate, or an efficient use of officers' time, to try to anticipate which information we would have to provide under the Act. If you put requests for information to the Council when the Act is in force then, naturally, we would act in line with our statutory responsibilities.

Your position seems to be, "We won't give away anything requested until we have to, unless we judge that it suits our interests." This is hardly the spirit of the Act. Is there any policy in Brent that says that you must wait until January 2005?

There are, however, various exemptions when information does not have to be provided. Such circumstances include information provided in confidence and relating to commercial interests and trade secrets. These might be relevant considerations in relation to your requests.

I was aware Section 43 in the Act relating to commercial interests. I had examined Brent Council's Freedom of Information Publication Scheme. This says nothing about how the Council will apply the Act with regard to contractors. The words "contract" and "contractor" do not appear in the Council's scheme. "Commercial" appears only under Environmental Health in relation to contaminated land and under Planning Information in relation to analysis of planning applications.

I suggested meeting with an Officer with expertise in the Act in order to find out what scope there will be for concerned citizens to make use of Freedom of Information to find out about matters that relate to commercial interests. I thought this might be useful for the Council as well as for my research. There must be some grey areas given the range of contracts and types of information pertaining to them.

In the meanwhile I remain of the opinion that it would not be appropriate to provide you with details of Leisure Connection's contract, or the Council's monitoring of that contract.

For me this is the nub of the matter. You are deciding now and may be deciding in a similar way next year what is appropriate. But there is no specific guidance to indicate to ratepayers whether your opinion is justifiable. There is scope for commercial interests to be used very widely and in a way the Act may not have intended.

Turning to your request to see the full customer survey results, it seems entirely reasonable for the Council to discuss the key findings first with Leisure Connection. The results will then be made publicly available on the Sports Service's area of the Environmental Services website.

I note you give no indication of when the report will be made available to the public. It seems unreasonable to me that the Council can cite the Customer Survey at Vale Farm (e.g. in the Draft Sports Strategy of March on the Council's website) but the people who pay for it, the ratepayers and users of Vale Farm, cannot see the full report of the survey.

In the meanwhile Environmental Services carry out regular customer satisfaction surveys, the results of which are already available on the website.

There are no meaningful figures on Brent's website relating to customer satisfaction at Vale Farm or other Brent leisure centres. The figures relate to "Sports" which includes more than the Leisure Centres. The only specific figures for Vale Farm relate to admissions and income and even here the latest figures available are for July-September 2003. The link for October-December 2003 does not work.

In summary, after four years of complaints, which you have twice upheld, about mismanagement at Vale Farm and in the Council's Leisure Service, I find your reply disappointing. As it raises questions about the interpretation and usefulness of the Freedom of Information Act I am therefore copying this email to the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

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