BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL

You may remember that a couple of weeks ago I reported that Stephen McNamara, Head of Legal Services at Bristol City Council was maintaining that we had no right to copies of Council documents or to inspect Council files. The rights of applicants are clearly defined in S11 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

He is now trying to pretend the requests do not exist and is crying vexatious requests under S14 of the Act.

However case law has determined that S11 is breached when the applicant has specified their preferred format at the time of making the request and this is then ignored by the authority. His lack of knowledge of the law is hard to comprehend, or is it simply that previous copies provided gave too much away.

Unfortunately the Information Commissioner's Office will have to determine this point, creating more delay. However this should be interesting given that the case law information was obtained from their website.

BRISTOL CITY COUNCIL

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 it says at Section 11,

Means by which communication to be made
(1) Where, on making his request for information, the applicant expresses a preference for communication by any one or more of the following means, namely—
(a) the provision to the applicant of a copy of the information in permanent form or in another form acceptable to the applicant,
(b) the provision to the applicant of a reasonable opportunity to inspect a record containing the information, and
(c) the provision to the applicant of a digest or summary of the information in permanent form or in another form acceptable to the applicant,
the public authority shall so far as reasonably practicable give effect to that preference.

but Stephen McNamara, Head of Legal Services at Bristol City Council, maintains that we have no right to copies of Council documents and have no right to inspect Council files.

The right is there in the Act for all to see, the preference is the applicants, appears to be deliberate delaying tactics. Perhaps we should call him "Speaker of Bristol City Council", and who is that hiding behind his chair, its only the Chief Executive.

Further developments expected.