Vexatious to vexing - the end (hopefully)

not Colonel Mustard with the revolver in the library

Mr Mustard has been somewhat busy in the parking ticket department (another win at PATAS yesterday for a visitor who was pounced on whilst collecting a visitor voucher) and so not had time to write up the third and final instalment of his journey to Freedom of Information.

Regular readers, and those who have read the Information Commissioners decision, will have generally got the impression that employees in the parking department and HR at Barnet Council would break down in tears at the sight of an FOI request from Mr Mustard or be signed off on sick leave due to stress. How they manage to be such complete and utter heartless b'stards when dealing with some poor soul who stayed 2 minutes too long in a parking space and due to events ended up with the bailiffs clamping their car will just have to be one of those unanswerable questions. Most staff ("officers" - bloody stupid name for them) are fine with Mr Mustard and three of them have asked him to help appeal their Barnet Council PCN - how ironic is that?

Now once Mr Mustard had the adverse decision that his questions (not him, thankfully) were vexatious he had to do something about it as no sane person would want the matter to rest like that. Now as it happens there was some lucky timing. Mr Mustard had attended the council's offices several times in June to look at their annual Accounts and see supporting information. With Black Hole Travers having climbed up to the top rung of the ladder, becoming the Chief Executive and we don't hear anything like as much about him as we used to about Nick Walkley (remember him? saddled yourself with some very difficult problems in Haringey, Nick - the bloggers of Barnet must look like light relief compared to every Fleet Street paper looking for blood) we needed a new S151 Officer (legally responsible for finance) and we got one with the rather fancy title of Chief Operating Officer and the name of Chris Naylor in January 13. Chris joined us from Tower Hamlets who have their own problems with transparency. Is there a boringly well run council anywhere in London? that is all Mr Mustard seeks from Barnet.

Now last year 3 bloggers attended together along with a well known parking expert who is the scourge of councils all over London. This year Mr Mustard attended alone as he knew the score and to help the council he gave them a list months in advance of what he wanted to see. Was it ready on his arrival? No, of course it wasn't. The council should not be surprised that they take a bashing when they are so unhelpful and stupid. One thing he asked for was the bailiff contracts for parking for the year. Mr Mustard had the suspicion that there weren't any and rather than tell him that they gave him an out of date contract 300 pages long. What a waste of paper. It didn't detain Mr Mustard for a minute. 

Now the council have to deal with his objection to the Accounts, one of 5 he has made, on which he anticipates that a verbal report will be made by Grant Thornton to the Audit Committee tomorrow evening. There is no scheduled agenda item to sign off the Accounts, which would be normal in October so it looks like at least one of the objections has been found to have merit. Chris, to his credit, says that the Audit Commission Act is there to be used.

Now one topic of enquiry was the invoices raised by Agilisys/iMpower for the year, all £3.7million of them. They were so heavily redacted that they told him nothing more than was on the over £500 spending list.

Anyway the one thing they did lead to was Chris Naylor offering Mr Mustard a meeting to have a chat about them. This was a novel idea. No-one else had dared put their head over the parapet previously and this initiative should be applauded. It doesn't mean that Mr Mustard is going to turn into a blogging version of the Tooting Twister as we don't want to do him out of a job, now do we? (oh what's that Mrs Angry, "yes of course we do", correct again of course) but he will, and already has, add in some balance to his posts when it adds to the story. So Mr Mustard agreed to a meeting but asked to change the agenda to his FOI question status. The meeting was going to be in Cafe Buzz but had to be moved to the North London Business Park as it was going to be followed by another meeting for Chris (one thing Mr Mustard mentioned was that there are probably staff who do nothing but sit in meetings and they are surplus to requirements if so).

So this meeting took place in the first week of September (Chris bought the teas) in the staff restaurant (see how open and transparent we are) and Mr Mustard offered the following compromise:

Ask up to 60 FOI questions p.a. and not write about junior staff. Most people would think that staff earning up to £56,000 a year weren't junior but that is the accepted definition. Mr Mustard hadn't asked a question since 12 July 2013 and had realised that he had so much information coming from other sources, and other pan-London questions to deal with, that 60 would be more than adequate for a year. He can still ask questions at committee meetings that won't be refused although answers can be obfuscatory and he has the annual audit visit and technically his tweets are FOI if they ask for facts like "who owns the blue bins"; answer "the council".

The counter-offer was a bit longer and here is a summary.

Chris wants 

- a "stronger working relationship" (very sensible)

- he wants the council to publish information regularly that is of use to interested members of the public and the default setting will be to publish (he has Mr Mustard's list to think about)

- he wants the council to be as receptive as possible to the insight and experiences of residents and service users (great but you should have been at this week's Constitution Committee, Chris, to see what councillors think of this. The very sensible idea to allow comments from residents to precede the business item rather than all be heard at the start of the meeting, was voted down on party lines. You may want to hear from residents but clearly some councillors don't. Cllr Thomas, for example, has never allowed any member of the public to have their 5 minutes to speak at Cabinet Resources Committee - unfixable problem? )

- a reasonable number of FOIs may be in the order of 60 p.a. (Mr Mustard having received this level will now show he doesn't need them and save his FOI for the really big issues or questions which he is asking of every London borough)

- he would welcome a monthly digest of service issues or complaints that Mr Mustard has learned about that month, both his and those of other residents (Mr Mustard isn't keen on having a monthly to do list for the council, who can read his blog and see the issues for themselves as many staff and councillors already do, and he has never been reticent about writing to senior officers, all councillors or relevant Cabinet members and the Leader but given that this proposal includes a response back he will inform the COO of the big issues. He has already asked him to find a way to take the £7m generated by parking tickets out of the budget but that is of course a political decision. Officer time may be helpful in finding savings elsewhere. The council will never be well regarded whilst it is issuing 165,000 PCN p.a. so it may be a sensible political decision to move gently away from parking income and make Barnet a nicer place to live).

So having agreed to the above arrangement the blog has gone on as per usual, more or less, and Mr Mustard has avoided having to spend days of his time reviewing 800 blog postings and removing anything that would have counted against him when reviewed by lawyers sitting in the Upper Tribunal and producing a huge bundle of documents and his arguments to the Tribunal. The council didn't think they were greatly at risk of having the ICO's decision overturned but then I didn't mention the smoking gun (not a real gun of course, but something that would have blown a huge hole in the main plank of the council's argument) that I had and which has now been put back in the drawer.

What can others who ask many FOI questions learn from this episode? The FOI legislation does not set out any limits on the number of questions one person can ask of an organisation which is where Mr Mustard went wrong by overdoing it. You would think that an organisation of 3,000 people could cope with a fairly high level of questions. 200 questions per annum, not all on parking but on varied topics, and it doesn't look very vexatious when compared to 165,000 parking tickets issued in a year. How can they cope with those? surely not because that leads to a huge income rather than a compliance cost? 

So what is an acceptable number of questions for others is not going to be either 200 p.a. or 60 p.a. because it will depend on who is asking, what they do with the information, the size of the organisation and so on, all the factors set out in the recent guidance. It would have been interesting to challenge the decision but really Mr Mustard couldn't be fagged to do so, he would have been unable to do other things that he currently wants to do.

Not asking many FOI won't stop the blog.

Our Mr Naylor got himself and the council some column inches yesterday in the Guardian, here. You'll see from the comments that three interested residents don't agree with him but at least we can talk about it like sensible adults. It may be Chris's default setting but it isn't Barnet Council's and he is going to have a heck of a battle on his hands getting everyone to see his point of view.

Now Mr Mustard being Mr Mustard and judging on actions not deeds he has set Chris a test. Last year the council developed Parking Recovery Plans when income from parking was below expectations. There was more chance of seeing a fish riding a bicycle than getting a copy of the documentation which was treated with the highest security clearance. Mr Mustard has asked Chris for a copy of those plans. 

Let us see, will he pass or fail? Watch this space.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

Update  19 November 13

I met with Chris Naylor and two of his colleagues this morning. CN handed over the Parking Recovery plans for the last two years. Mr Mustard can't see why the council went to such lengths to hide them as they are deadly dull and didn't show him the sort of information he expected to see. There is some unfortunate thinking within them, like introducing more CPZ simply to generate more revenue (ah, so they are profitable)  but everyone knew that anyway. Anyway, I am pleased he passed the test. the next one will just have to be a little harder.

Vexatious to vexing - stage 2

for supposedly warding off the evil eye

Now Mr Mustard comes to the next part of the journey. He asked the council questions, they refused to answer on the grounds of the vexatiousness of the questions, he asked for a review, the same decision was made 23 times (now down to 21 since 2 have been belatedly answered). Mr Mustard then sent them all off to the Information Commissioner and waited several months for them to reach the top of the pile. For 3 months or so he didn't bother asking questions as he expected them to be refused. He did send a few in once the council themselves got put on the ICO naughty step for their own answering lack of performance which does look to have improved.

The way the procedure then works is that the ICO asks the council to demonstrate why the questions were vexatious and then the ICO make a decision so it is made without Mr Mustard seeing any evidence of his alleged atrocities. If Mr Mustard read the whole decision with some other blogger's name in it, he wouldn't want to go for a pint with them. The whole decision can be read on this link (put the ref FS50480128 in the case reference box.). To save you wading through the whole thing, here are the highlights and lowlights and some added commentary:

The Council advised that the complainant (i.e. Mr Mustard) is a prolific blogger. (Don't suppose this was meant as a compliment but prolific is good) .

The council confirmed that the complainant has made a significant number of requests, identifying 476 individual requests made by him since April 2010, together with 44 requests for internal review (Mr Mustard can't be bothered to count them up but the number of questions looks about right. He has no idea about the number of internal reviews which might reflect, amongst other things, the secrecy of the council in redacting so much).

It explained that response and internal review outcomes have often resulted in follow-up requests and further email correspondence from the complainant ( This seems to be written as if its a negative thing. If the answer leads to new interesting information then why shouldn't a new question be asked? you can't ask questions about secrets you didn't know about until the FOI answer arrived. Follow-up emails are often to try and get a proper answer).

In an internal email acquired by making a subject access request ...the complainant was referred to as having been declared vexatious (it is of course the case that only a question can be declared as vexatious and not a person. This internal email shone a light onto the wrongheaded thinking of the officer concerned).

The term "vexatious" is not defined within FOIA. (That made it harder for any requestor to avoid their questions being so labelled).

The council argued that the complainant has sent in large numbers of letters and that it considers them to be a severe burden on resources.

The council submitted an email from a member of its parking team that sets out the disproportionate levels of disruption and distress caused by the time and resources needed to answer the complainant's requests. The statement also makes clear that the parking service is experiencing a significant burden in terms of officer times and diversion away from other work. (such as issuing 165,000 PCN per annum which rather makes Mr Mustard's requests look rather paltry).

To demonstrate that the complainant has caused distress to members of its staff the Council provided...73 pages of entries from the complainant's blog (which only proves what was written not that the posts caused distress).

The Council told the Commissioner that it has clear evidence of its staff experiencing distress when in the course of handling the complainant's requests...(which is a claim that was not tested in any way).

It is clear to the Commissioner that the complainant has googled some of the Council's staff, compiled information about them and then used it to tie in with their professional lives and, in some cases, subjected it to public ridicule via his blog. Staff members then have no way to refute or correct the position. (Of course people get googled, council employees have googled Mr Mustard's alter ego and their names show up in Linked-In when they look at his profile and sometimes you can see what search terms were used by them in other areas. If Mr Mustard has repeated content from the internet, including from staff's own blogs and it is wrong the first thing they should do is correct it at the source. To avoid being ridiculed, best not to write anything ridiculous. Mr Mustard does not like to be inaccurate. He has removed 2 entries entirely from his blog. The first when the former member of staff phoned Mr Mustard up on his work line, which is easily found if you google him!, and the other following an approach from another employee who simply asked for the post to be taken down as there was something Mr Mustard didn't know and couldn't be told. Until last month no senior council employee had the obvious idea of sitting down with Mr Mustard for a chat and buying him a cup of tea).

As a result the council has said that at least one of its employees have taken avoidance steps such as resetting all their preferences on social networking sites to a more secure option, opting out of the electoral role and making their telephone number ex-directory. (Mr Mustard is amazed by how much information people post on the internet without checking how visible it is or realising they might as well put it on a billboard on a busy road - actually it would be seen by fewer people there. You can sort of opt out of the electoral roll to stop your data being sold but don't think that makes you invisible as it doesn't. We are all on hundreds of databases. Mr Mustard doesn't go around phoning staff at home and only very rarely phones them at work. The last time was to get the clamp removed from a Motability car and that wasn't Mr Mustard being vexatious, now was it, but the council's bailiff. Oh, and 3 members of staff have asked him to appeal their Barnet Council parking tickets in the last month.)

The council stated that its intention is not to declare that all the complainant's requests lack serious purpose and value when looked at in isolation. (but somehow when all added together they do)

It is important to note that it is not the requestor who is 'vexatious' but his or her request(s). (we should all ask difficult questions of our council).

The Commissioner is satisfied that different requestors can make the same request and receive differing outcomes in terms of whether the request is vexatious, once the relevant context has been considered for each of those individuals (which makes the whole exercise pretty pointless as the obvious workaround is for others to ask Mr Mustard's questions for him).

So there you have the guts of the 11 pages of the Information Commissioner's decision. You can see that Barnet Council spent days putting their case together. No wonder the legal budget is overspent.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

From Vexatious to merely vexing - a journey - stage 1.

Vexatious: seeking only to annoy (that is from the dictionary; vexatious isn't actually defined in Freedom of Information legislation and Mr Mustard has unfortunately helped to formulate what it means. Doh!)

Vexed: Irritated, angered,(of a problem) difficult and much discussed, problematic.

It was Mrs Angry of Broken Barnet fame (currently to be found paddling in the sea off Brighton due to some meeting or other, Mr Mustard wouldn't know the details because it involves Politics with a big P which Mr Mustard simply doesn't have time for. Ooh, and La Bloggeuse was on the telly) who told Mr Mustard that he was only vexing not vexatious. (Yes, she did also tell him he had overdone the number of questions, as did two other people, but by then it was too late and Mr Mustard had the ICO's decision to deal with.)

Rather than spend hours preparing for a long, tedious and difficult hearing in front of the First Tier Tribunal at which Barnet Council would have instructed the best specialist barrister available (an uneven contest against a lay person) at which every rotten word he had ever written would have been dragged out of the blog and given an out-of-context airing, which the tribunal would probably have frowned upon, Mr Mustard negotiated a settlement with the Chief Operating Officer but more of that later. Before then, you need the scene to be set. 

What were those vexatious questions that Mr Mustard asked a year ago and caused such angst. These:

and these (two others were answered recently as they weren't vexatious after all, but by then Mr Mustard didn't really need the answers anyway)

So Mr Mustard thinks you will agree that these were not particularly taxing in terms of time and weren't likely to lead to Mr Mustard writing about an individual except in one case where the post was quite senior and that is allowed and the intention was to blog about the rapid turnover in personnel within the post and improper procurement that he wanted to write about, in any case.

So why did Mr Mustard ask these question? Answers follow the question numbers.

1.  In order to compare the numbers of tickets issued since NSL took over to when it was in-house. We now know from other reports that following NSL's appointment parking tickets have increased by 25%. Coincidence? Mr Mustard doesn't think so.

2.  The invoices supplied in response to a question didn't match the ones on the over £500 spending list.

3.  Asked for NSL's invoices each month so that the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) payments could be tracked.

4.  To confirm what Mr Mustard already knew that the answer was nil. A gross dereliction of duty and the cause of much trouble now that they are being sent off to bailiffs a year after the event.

5.  The council had just voted to start enforcing these moving traffic violations. There is a consultation ongoing about the location of new cctv cameras but some will be placed at these locations whatever the public says.

6.  So that costs of PayByPhone could be compared to the cost of cash collection from meters.

7.  To see what template wordings were in use.

8.  To get a feel for the likely success of an informal appeal and whether 100% of them were rejected.

9.  The minutes cannot have been sufficiently clear.

10.  Just to see what the plan was and whether it included longer hours, targeting particular offences etc.

11.  The parking department should produce an annual report and send it to the mayor. If they had done so this question would not have been necessary. The question was so that the trend of income could be looked at accurately.

12.  The circumstances around the appointment of the AD were murky to say the least.

13.  It was not produced in breach of legislation.

14.  This question was about the manner of serving to get a handle on the numbers affixed to vehicle or handed to driver or sent in the post.

15.  This was to see if proper procedures had been followed for a friend who had a PCN. It was won on review at PATAS.

16.  To see if NSL were doing that aspect of their job or just issuing PCN regardless.

17.  The TMO were given to NSL on a memory stick so it was a few minutes work for the council to provide these and then not have to deal with individual requests.

18.  In Woodside Grove there are CPZ bays across people's drives which is rather odd and an explanation would have been useful and appreciated.

19.  This question was asked on someone else's behalf. Next time they can ask their own.

20.  as for 3.

Do these questions strike you as particularly long, complicated, unreasonable, obsessive, difficult, excessive or anything else if all asked in one month or vexatious? Put your view in the comment box below.

The second part of the story will follow soon although Mr Mustard does have to spend some time looking at the 2,000+ page Capita contract for Customer services (NSCSO) which Mr Reasonable asked for and Mr Mustard didn't as he hasn't asked a question of Barnet Council (hello to Governance in TfL, Haringey, Harrow and Islington where he has) since 12 July (which was a request for the locations & numbers of PayByPhone bays which must be in a spreadsheet somewhere: Answer - vexatious!) and he is now free to ask on Parking, Parking Tickets and CPZ's but hasn't. 

Ironically if he had asked for the NSCSO contract, a multi-million pound decade long and controversial outsourcing deal, that would not have been rejected out of hand as being vexatious (it would have been declined on the grounds of future publication which has now happened). Funny old world!

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The Friday Joke - Activist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

True activists

Mr Mustard does not think of himself as an "Activist". He doesn't even bear comparison with 1% of the achievements of the true Activists on the link above. What Mr Mustard is sure of is that he is opposed to the reckless gamble that is the One Barnet programme, but that doesn't make him an "Activist", it makes him someone who has carefully studied all of the paperwork he can lay his hands on and make as considered a decision as he can in the circumstances. He certainly doesn't expect to be branded when he makes a relatively minor planning enquiry.

At the bottom of the garden this monstrous carbuncle was built without planning permission, which it turned out was required.

Mr Mustard leapt into action.


24 May - email to the planning officer, copied to Councillors Rams, Longstaff & Joanna Tambourides as she is the Cabinet Member with responsibility for planning.

This isn't your fault (so I am not complaining about you but about the system) but it was some months ago that I pointed out to the council that sending out planning alerts before the documents are on the system is not the most helpful way of going on. When one receives an email one wants to deal with it there and then, not to have to set up a reminder. To properly consider a planning application looking at the drawings is essential. The council's alerts say that documents will be on the system in up to 5 working days which is a week basically. By that time the matter can be forgotten about.

Either you need to slow down the planning alerts by 5 working days or you need to get documents scanned & onto the system more quickly. Please pass this email up the management chain to whoever can make a decision that will enable residents to immediately put themselves in the picture upon receipt of an alert and can then take a greater part in the planning process.

Can you also please email me the documents for the above case.

---

A response was received the same day.

---

Thanks for copying me in to your email. I am checking in to the point you make and will contact you again shortly.

Cllr. Joanna Tambourides
East Barnet Ward
Cabinet Member for Planning
London Borough of Barnet

---

Mr Mustard only had to wait until 28 May for the further contact and here it is, with emphasis added by Mr Mustard:

With regard to your original query, we have now been able to establish that our Planning Alert software does not allow us to wait until all the documents have been uploaded before sending out the alert. As soon as the application is logged on the system, it automatically triggers the alert. Perhaps this might change in the future, but at present we have to work with the system as it is. Even with its faults, it is a very valuable system to residents and activists like yourself across the Borough.

You could always “flag” the alert email, or put it to “Unread” as a way of reminding you to return to it again after a few days when all the documents will have been uploaded – this is what I do all the time.

We always adhere to the national policy about consultation. In many cases our officers will often be more generous in our consultation where there is marked public interest, and on large applications this can and does work out at several thousands of letters (with consequential administrative costs). In this particular case it was confined to those most directly affected, as you have mentioned.

Thank you for your comments.

Cllr. Joanna Tambourides

East Barnet Ward

Cabinet Member for Planning

London Borough of Barnet

---

Mr Mustard has never spoken directly to Mrs Tambourides and his only contacts with her has been that she is one of the 63 councillors who get the same round robin letters that Mr Mustard sends on his own behalf now and then, or sometimes on behalf of the famous five Barnet Bloggers, so it isn't like there is any history which would colour her judgment.

Mr Mustard is known for his dogged determination and so he emailed back on 29 May

---

Dear Mrs Tambourides

Thank you for your suggestion as to how I might better organise myself. I don't believe in writing lists of things to do unless I really have to. I am a "doer" rather than a "to doer". This might be an area where some fat could be stripped out of the town hall, getting staff to do things rather than write lists, or set reminders, about them.

I don't see why you need to label me as an "activist", rather than merely a resident, when I can see the monstrous carbuncle of the ugly rectangular box dormer from my dining room and thus I wrote as a local person who is concerned for the built environment and the lovely Victorian houses of my street & environs.

I am presuming of course that you are labelling me as an activist as a pejorative term because I oppose the extraordinarily risky punt in the dark that is otherwise known as the One Barnet programme which is irrelevant to my perusal of a local planning issue. That is not to be an "activist" but a rational long-term thinking resident who is concerned that he will have to pay for any mistakes made by the Cabinet whose members couldn't even be bothered to read the massive decade long contracts that it is railroading us into.

---

Now that caused some consternation as that afternoon he received a response:

I am not labelling you at all. You have read all sorts of things in to my use of a word. Nothing pejorative was meant at all, I assure you.

Cllr. Joanna Tambourides

East Barnet Ward

Cabinet Member for Planning

London Borough of Barnet

---

29 May and Mr Mustard emailed again

Dear Mrs Tambourides

Do you regularly write to residents and call them activists then in response to local planning matters?

---

Since then it has been rather quiet and nothing further has been received. Evidently the answer is that Cllr Tamboruides does not normally label residents and Mr Mustard suspects that she will be doubly careful not do so in the future.

Mr Mustard has asked about the costs of the email alert system, you can sign up for it here, and cost and terms of scanning the documents but as the council are suddenly finding his innocent enquiries to be vexatious again it might be some months before he gets a reply.

If you have been written to in an unfortunate manner by your councillor, do please share.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

The foibles of the FOI system

The over exposure disclosure log

Two related blog posts to read this weekend with Mrs Angry and Mr Mustard ploughing the same furrow having both come across personal details of other residents that we shouldn't have whilst casually surfing the council website. So decide what you want to read first, serious and funny with Mrs Angry, or just plain serious with Mr Mustard, get yourself a cup of tea, ignore the snow and read. Enjoy your weekend. Barnet Council won't, they have work to do correcting their blunders.

Based on the above, council employees could be forgiven for thinking that the overall performance of the council is wonderful when to comes to FOI. Whilst pleased to see that more focus has been placed on this area, as Mr Mustard was, until what amounts to a ban came into force, the best customer of the FOI department and so he knows that the council didn't have a 100% record in September 2012.

How does he know? Well for a start he has 2 questions which were outstanding from September and are still not yet answered. His references are 1370 & 1371 and the council ones are 181337 and 180978. Mr Mustard has sent gentle reminders in that he would still like his questions to be answered. (Since the draft of this blog was written last week there has been some movement from the council but the further information provided doesn't make any sense and has been queried).

What is more, the council website tells you that they failed to answer one on time. Here it is.

Friern barnet library costs by MisterMustard

You will have noticed an entire paragraph of apology showing that basically the FOI department lost control of the answering process and that it took 90 days to answer rather than the targeted 20.

These three omissions reduce the compliance rate down to 97% at best.

Mr Mustard has just noticed something else about this internal trumpeting. It was written on 17 October. The council is allowed up to 20 working days to respond to FOI. If a question is asked on, say, 28 September about traffic calming in front of Moss Hall school, as it was, then the council have until 26 October to answer. The council answered on that very day and yet the "aren't we wonderful" intranet message was issued on 17 October and is in the past tense. Tut tut, announcing results before they have come to pass. We don't just need salt to grit the roads with in Barnet, we need a hefty pinch of it to have to hand when we read council documents.

Two things helped September to be a good month.

The first is that the number of requests was historically low in that month at 93. Both July and August of that same financial quarter saw 117 requests so the lowest & easiest month was reported on by the internal communications wallah. Numbers are also lower than in early 2011 which saw the following numbers

Jan 11 - 119

Feb 11 - 122

March 11 - 145 (Mr Mustard was born!)

April 11 - 125

average - 128

so it was much easier to hit target in September 2012. It is interesting to note this fall from 2011 to 2012 as usually requests just keep rising with time. Come on people, you must be more inquisitive, it isn't as if loads of useful information is freely available on the council website.

The second reason is that it was in September 12 that FOI got the hump with Mr Mustard and starting deeming his requests to be vexatious. They didn't stop until they had made 23 requests vexatious and Mr Mustard stopped making requests in his own name because there wasn't any point any longer - that is effectively a ban. He has a battery of individuals who are happy to ask his questions and they can't be linked to Mr Mustard so miraculously the questions get answered and aren't deemed to be vexatious, funny that.

FOI rules are clear. It is the question and not the person that has to be vexatious. How does Mr Mustard know it is him who is being viewed as vexatious? Well because he took the first question that was deemed to be vexatious and asked a pillar of the local community to ask it again in the identical terms. Did the question then get deemed vexatious a second time? No, because it came from another person it miraculously became an acceptable question and was answered in the usual way. The complaint has just gone in to the Information Commissioner and the outcome will be known in 3 - 6 months time.

Just in case you were wondering what sort of questions Mr Mustard has been asking, here is a sample question that was deemed to be vexatious:

Please provide a list of all parking locations reported as defective by NSL CEOs during September 2012.

What on earth can be the problem with asking that?

Mr Mustard happens to know that there are other problems with FOI. There are problems with responses sent in RTF (Rich Text Format rather than in .doc or .docx) which open up as gobbledegook. The council could save us all the time of converting, or having to ask again for the answer in a readable format by not using their apparently non-standard version of rtf. When the question has been sent in by email and the answer is largely composed of text then the most effective way in which to answer is to reply within the body of an email and not to add an extra document that is not necessary and then the .rtf problem goes away. To add a spreadsheet is fine if the information is largely tabular in nature.

When you look at the answers which are published on-line there are other problems. There are answers which refer to attached documents but they are not available to download and that is where the meat of the answer lies so it is useless to publish an empty response.

There are other interesting problems. The published answers which are headed with the phrase "Do not publish" are always particularly interesting. The Tooting Twister is responsible for the website. Do you ever look at it Mr Palmer?

Sometimes the name, address and telephone number of the requester is visible in the question. That is a breach of Data Protection law.

The council managed to publish Mr Mustard's real name in one answer and then his address in another. The council were given the opportunity to investigate several months ago and if they did so they certainly didn't tell Mr Mustard the outcome. He has now complained to the Information Commissioner as he has found other much worse breaches of data protection in the disclosure log including the entire question from one person which discloses not only their name & home address but their email address and telephone numbers to boot.

There are other data breaches about someone in a care home and about toilets in a public park. Yet more about empty commercial properties and for all of these the published information contains the names, addresses, telephone numbers and/or email addresses of private individuals which should not have been put into the public domain by the council.

Mr Mustard wrote in June 12 about the need for more resource in FOI and none seems to have been added. The resulting mess is the outcome of a small number of staff doing their best with a new system and getting it wrong in an area where there just isn't room for error.

What needs to be done? The disclosure log needs to be taken off-line until every single one of the almost 700 published answers has been checked and shown to be compliant with the Data Protection Act. A review needs to be carried out of the staff resource in FOI to see if it is adequate.

There is a very useful website, Finchlinks, which brings together all of the Barnet related questions that have been asked through the Whatdotheyknow website for various public bodies. You can find it here.

The next paragraph was written before the date and then the blog post was held back and now we have even more snow so a good job that Mr Mustard didn't postpone just for one week.
Due to the anticipated snowfall on Monday it has been decided not to hold the usual second Monday FOI Club meeting in January. Please put the second Monday evening in February in your diary now. The 11 February at 7pm. A change of venue to be more central in the borough to the Bohemia public house, details here, and a slightly extended agenda to the Mr Mustard FOI, Social and Parking Ticket Club (yes, a catchy name, a Mr Mustard t-shirt to whoever comes up with the best alternative name)

bang opposite Cafe Buzz

near Tally Ho corner in North Finchley.

Still some room for improvement in FOI. You get 9/10 for improving the response time but 0/10 for your silliness in deeming 23 requests as vexatious.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

An extra £10,000 on books?

10,000 books not an extra £10,000 of book purchases

It is the season of goodwill and so Mr Mustard is going to give Cllr Robert Rams's blog a little extra publicity today. Robert likes to be in the public eye except that it is usually the eye of the storm he finds himself in.

Here are some of the words which Mr Mustard has cut-and-pasted from Robert's blog post of 7 June 2011:

As I said recently .............. the Library Review was never going to be universally popular. This is despite the extra £10,000 per year we will spend on books,................

Under our strategy, Friern Barnet library will move, and merge with the North Finchley library. All the services currently provided at the Friern Barnet site will be provided at the artsdepot. The library at the artsdepot will be one of our largest; it will be a landmark library that specialises in the arts. It will hold more stock, have longer opening hours, will open on Sundays, and have extra study space and facilities.

Ah yes, the Artsdepot. It will not be "one of our largest", it will not be "a landmark library", it will hold zero stock not "more stock", it will not "open on Sundays" it won't have any library "facilities". Perhaps Robert needs to go back and correct that entry on his blog and delete all the incorrect statements which will make for an interesting post, just white space.

Now Mr Mustard was interested in the spending on books in libraries but as the FOI department have got the hump with him, and deem every simple little request that he makes to be vexatious, he had to get a friend to ask the question. She received an answer in 16 days and luckily Mr Mustard has lots of friends who are happy to ask questions on his behalf.

So it was in June 11 that Robert said that an extra £10,000 p.a. would be spent on books. Did that happen in 2011/12? No it didn't as this table and graph show.

31-Mar	Spend £
2004	459,065
2005	674,094
2006	594,786
2007	470,659
2008	444,599
2009	416,668
2010	409,197
2011	390,762
2012	387,830

Will extra spend arrive in 2012/13? It probably will now as Robert will read this post and have to go off and bother senior officers to make sure it happens as an FOI question will be asked after the year has ended. The clear evidence though is that spending on books has been reduced year on year since 2005.

Anything that Robert Rams says has to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It seems that his Cabinet colleagues might agree as here are 2 of them, from a year ago, checking if they have enough salt in stock to cope with all the imaginary landmark library utterances, or something like that.

Have a Happy Christmas readers and go easy on the salt as it really isn't good for your health to have too much of it.

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard