Suffolk County Council U-Turn on Library FOI Request

Back in February I served a Freedom of Information request on Suffolk County Council asking for the full consultation responses at the end of the library consultation. The consultation finally ended on 30th April 2011. Back in March I got a response that stated:

This information will be published in July 2011, after cabinet have met. Having also considered the public interest the Council’s decision is, therefore, to withhold the information requested at this time. The Council has determined that it is not in the public interest to release this information before cabinet has met.

I appealed against this as I considered this response unlawful and after a lot of difficulty finally an internal review was carried out by the Chief Information Office which upheld the council's position (hardly surprisingly).

I then appealed to the Information Commissioner and this appeal was still ongoing until Friday. But what changed things seemed to be a combination of me asking Cllr Judy Terry on camera about it and the election of Mark Bee as Leader of Suffolk County Council.

On Friday just as I was arriving at the election count and hearing the news that Andrea Hill was on "gardening leave" I got an email from Suffolk County Council backing down on this issue and agreeing to release the consultation responses before cabinet in July (with the cabinet papers).

This is a significant climbdown from the ridiculous position that the County Council were holding of releasing the results of the consultation after the decision had been made. It almost made up for loosing in the elections :-)