On the 30th of August 2023, the Information Commissioner’s Office issued Devon County Council with a Practice Recommendation following an assessment of our response times to freedom of information (FOI) requests. In response to this practice recommendation, the Council have taken the following steps.
- FOI Lessons Learned Exercise
We undertook a lessons learned exercise to better understand the reasons for our FOI performance. This led to the publication of an FOI Lessons Learned Executive Summary, which sets out the causes for our FOI performance and makes suggestions for how that might be improved.
- FOI Action Plan
We agreed an Action Plan with the Information Commissioner’s Office that was informed by our lessons learned exercise. This sets out the agreed steps that Devon County Council will take over the coming months to improving our FOI performance.
- Published FOI Response Times
We agreed to publish our response times for FOI and Environmental Information Regulations requests. These figures are available from our Freedom of Information Response Rates page.