Council’s Freedom of Information response criticised

The Scottish Information Commissioner has upheld a Freedom of Information complaint against Dundee City Council.

The council was found to be wrong in refusing to provide information on several topics to Mr RJ Soutar on the basis that it would cost more than the £600 limit to do so.

Mr Soutar had grouped the information he sought into six sets of questions, but the commissioner Rosemary Agnew found that the council was wrong to have aggregated them for the purpose of applying the cost limit.

She also found the council should have identified some of Mr Soutar’s requests as seeking environmental information.

The council should have helped Mr Soutar to narrow his requests, and she ordered them to address each of the requests individually and not as a single request, and to do so by August 18.

Mr Soutar sought information on the number of times in the last five years the ombudsman, a tribunal or a court had found the council acted wrongly, whether standing orders had been regularly ignored, the cost of works carried out in Anton Drive, and the total value of construction work carried out in-house in the last five years.