North Yorkshire Police has pledged to improve its freedom of information performance after the amount of responses handled on time fell as low as 9%.
The Information Commissioner’s Office included the county’s force in a list of police forces whose FOI responses was deemed under-performing.
Now the force has referred itself to the ICO over its timeliness of responses, its backlog of requests and its low performance.
Organisations are required to respond to requests promptly and within 20 working days. North Yorkshire Police has a target of meeting this 95% of the time but its performance in recent years has fallen woefully short.
It fell as low as 9% in April 2020 and the highest it has reached is 59% in August the same year.
The ICO said in a report dated October 2020:
“Although significant progress has been made to improve NYP’s performance, the Commissioner’s analysis of the performance statistics has led her to issue this practice recommendation to ensure that the trend of improvement continues and NYP achieves satisfactory levels of timeliness.”
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A total of 365 FOI requests were outstanding in April 2020. Of that figure, 309 requests were overdue and 193 were over six months old.
North Yorkshire Police revealed last week it had created an action plan to tackle the problem.
It said the reason for its lack of response was “mainly caused by increased volumes of FOIA requests, subject access requests and Family Court Order request”.
North Yorkshire Police’s FOI response performance as submitted to the Information Commissioner. Table: ICO.
The police action plan has set a target to respond to 85% of requests within 20 working days by September 2022.
The plan recognised its compliance rates had not been met. It said that this was down to “reduced staff resources” and “continued demand for disclosure”.
