Once again it’s a mister boring post for most people, the link takes you to the traffic sources for this blog for last month.http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/done/id5.htm
Outside of all of the conventional statistics available from various websites, none of which have much of a ring of truth about them, this is as near as I can get to a popularity chart of the local blogs that link to this blog.
One point of note here is that Thanet Life Blog has only just been updated so that it has a live Java link to this site on it, so we won’t know where it comes until next month.
Many thanks to the 2,508 Absolute Unique Visitors who read this weblog last month.
If you cannot think of anything, why not comment on the cost to taxpayers of all the FOI requests being made to TDC?
ReplyDeleteThought I had in my previous post Rearview mirror, one foi request for the development agreement for a major local project back in October. It’s been round the officer, executive, chief executive, information commissioner, monitoring officer route pretty much twice. All highly paid individuals and as far as I can see all trying to keep the plates spinning until they get a different job within government and avoid making any decision that could reflect upon their future careers. So the decision to either send me the document or not that should have been made by the officer in charge of the project within 10 days, with legal reference to the monitoring officer is still in an expensive orbit.
ReplyDeleteThe rule should be with all council documents, put them on the council website unless there is a very good reason no to and then we wouldn’t have to bother them with fois but just Google them.
But untill they do put it online, should people be allowed to frivilously put in FOI requests at the tax payers expense?
ReplyDeleteSurely a better way would be to organise a campaign to get this information on-line?
RVM the campaigns about foi were fought and now we have the act, our problem is that the council appears to dislike making information available to the public and so is doing so particularly badly and expensively.
ReplyDeleteWith Pleasurama they have just spent £1m on cliff repairs that even a child could see hadn’t worked properly and no they don’t want to talk about it.
RVM
ReplyDeleteName an FOI application that is "Frivolous".
And argue your case ?
At least we live in a democracy and the FOI act is meant to ensure that bodies such as TDC are transparent, above corruption and non political. If a council cannot answer what is often a simple request within a reasonable amount of time then that council runs the risk of being accused of either being secretive, political, undemocratic or just plain old inefficient.
ReplyDeleteWhere do TDC fit in all this?
Could I suggest all four reasons, 19:13 that you list?
ReplyDeleteAnyone who doubts whether corruption exists here in Kent in local government may care to read the case reported in Kentnewsonline yesterday of the Canterbury planning committee councilor and the property developer. The councilor is accused of living rent free for 6 years.
ReplyDeleteThe reason FOI requests are so expensive is that tdc has of course invented a extremely bureacratic way of dealing with them. If you pay all the officers £50,000 a year it will be expensive. If you make a job for the ex head of HR at the same time it increases your costs even more, and tongue in cheek if you give them nice new carpets and double glazing your costs will really rocket,
ReplyDelete