BCC Freedom of Information Performance Update - Two Years Late (so far)

BCC have published their FOI Performance Numbers for 2025 Q4 (Oct to Dec 2025). Whilst their compliance rate (%ge of responses provided within the statutory deadline) has risen to 77%, this is still well below the ICO Target of 90%

This week there was a question in the Full Council Public Forum related to Freedom of Information Requests.

QUESTION PQ 28

Question submitted by: Dan Ackroyd

To Cllr. Dyer, Leader of Council Subject: Committee Seats and FOI Service

FOI service Question

It seems to me, that Bristol City Council is continuing to fail on the delivery of the FOI service.

Part of the problem is that the staff on not trained on how to search tools. This leads to FOI requests taking up a lot of time.

Another part is that, as reported by an internal Council document, staff "perceived political interference" in how it operated.

Another problem is that it is clear that the Council just ignores some requests. One example: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/deconsecration_of_st_mary_le_por

What is being done to address this situation?

This was the response:

The council are continually looking to improve our processes around Freedom of Information responses. We have published an action plan on the Councils website which sets out how we are looking to improve. This can be found on our Freedom on Information pages, and a link is here: https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/10037-bcc-freedom-of-information-foi-actionplan

The Action Plan

The Council only recently published their Action Plan on their web site, and I actually had to submit an FOI Request in March 2025 in order to see the action plan! It is worth noting that the Action Plan send to me, is different from the one that the Council have published. The main difference is that they stripped out date information that showed how they had failed to complete the actions in a timely manner.

For example, this was how the "iCasework" action was described in March 2025. This makes it clear that the plan was not being progressed at this time as the plan showed that this action should have been completed by 31/12/2023.

And this is the published version of the same action item:

The Action plan was only created in response to an ICO Notice (30 Aug 2023), which stated:

The Council should create an action plan, incorporating any recovery plan already in development, with appropriate processes put into place to ensure 90% timeliness is achieved by the end of December 2023. This action plan should be supported by a ‘lessons learned’ exercise, which examines the root cause of delays from allocation through to clearance at different stages, with mitigations for any recurring problems addressed specifically in the plan.

The plan contains 14 actions, 9 of which are "Complete", 2 were due to be completed in Dec 2025 (the plan has not been updated to show completion of these actions), and the other 3 are described as being "Ongoing (no target date as this is a constant process)".

These are the 3 ongoing actions that do not have a due date.

These 3 actions can be summarised as "make sure people are trained", "assign enough people to the work", and "hope new technology will make it easier in the future".

This effectively means that the Action Plan has been completed and there is no further pro-active actions being taken to improve the FOI Service.

But as the Compliance Rate was only 76% at the end of 2021, and 4 years later is 77%, how do the Council think they are going to reach the ICO Compliance target of 90%, especially when the ICO required them to meet the 90% target by 31/12/2023.

We are now more than 2 years past the ICO deadline, and the Action Plan has clearly failed to deliver the required outcomes. This shows that the response to the Full Council question is disingenuous at best.

Council Response:

The council are continually looking to improve our processes around Freedom of Information responses. We have published an action plan on the Councils website which sets out how we are looking to improve.

Perhaps a more honest response would have been:

Our Action Plan has failed to meet the ICO Compliance Target of 90% by 31/12/2023. This is only 2 years late (so far) and based on current progress we hope to meet the ICO Target by 2030. It would be helpful if people stopped submitting FOI requests (e.g. the "tree people") and asking questions about the FOI Process. We are also looking to reject more FOI Requests as being "Vexacious", which should help to improve our performance figures.

We also expect Bristol City to be re-organised into a larger authority at some point, which will then make this someone else's problem.

These are the people who have submitted the most FOI Requests to BCC via WhatDoTheyKnow since Jan 2024.