Debenham Library Read-in 19th March

Creators of the "Library" acrostic pose for a photo

An all night marathon read-in began today at Suffolk's smallest library in Debenham. Crowds gathered to hear local people read and to write slogans on the wall of the library.

Local county councillor Eddy Alcott briefly appeared at the event. When local teenagers challenged him to sign the petition to Save Suffolk's Libraries he refused. He looked very uncomfortable but claimed to the BBC and local people that he wanted to see the library kept open. He quickly left interestingly before local MP Dan Poulter arrived.

MP Dr Dan Poulter signs the Save
Suffolk Libraries petition

Local MP Dan Poulter came along and signed the petition and even left his mark on the wall. He was presented with letters from primary school children appealing to him to help to save the library and Dr Poulter promised to "do all that he could" to help. Dr Poulter stayed for quite a while and several people present engaged him in conversation about library closures and, inevitably, wider issues at Suffolk County Council such as the New Strategic Direction and Andrea Hill.

Dr Poulter has already raised the issue of Ms Hill's salary in parliament calling on her to take a pay cut and was critical of the County Council for not dealing with this issue. He also promised to continue to support local libraries having previously attended a meeting at Stradbroke and raised the issue with ministers.

The marathon read-in is still continuing all night and finishes at 4pm on Sunday.

A full set of photos can be seen on Flickr

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The Hill Photo Saga...When in a hole...

An unhappy looking Cllr Eddy
Alcock, Chairman of Suffolk CC

I was at the Debenham library read-in earlier today and as you can imagine that was a lot of conversation about the latest Andrea Hill story which made made the nationals today. Photos of Ms Hill were on page 2 of The Sun and in The Telegraph.

In case you don't live in Suffolk I should explain. Suffolk County Council pay their CEO Andrea Hill some £218 000 a year and it was just discovered that some £1400 of tax papers money was used to take photos of her. Except apparently the money was not just spent on photos of Ms Hill. Today the Press Office are saying that the money was for photos of a whole bunch of people including 14 councillors and the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Council. See the Evening Star for full details. The Chairman of the Council, Eddy Alcock was present today and refused to sign the petition to Save Suffolk Libraries. To save any further public expenditure I took a photograph of him. For some reason he does not look very happy...

The Debenham Banksy!

Views on Andrea Hill

So it took FOUR freedom of information requests and the Council still got it wrong and a whole bunch more people are now implicated. Oh and this is released after the story has made the nationals! Someone really should tell Suffolk County Council that they are in a hole and should stop digging, this is not making things sound better but worse!

Suffolk County Council's Freedom of Information handling "unlawful"

I was unhappy yesterday when my Freedom of Information request for the full responses from the library consultation were met with a refusal on the grounds that they were going to publish the information later. In this case much later in July after the cabinet meets to decide the fate of Suffolk's libraries.

For those interested in the legals the refusal was made using an exemption under s22 of the Freedom of Information Act. But this exemption is subject to what is called a "public interest test" which was completely missing.

As I detailed in my blog post I phoned Suffolk County Council and asked for this and was told they don't normally provide it but would in this case as I had asked. The phone was then unceremoniously put down on me. They have so far failed to provide the information they promised.

Clearly the County Council thought I was being unreasonable and annoying but last night I made some very interesting discoveries on the Information Commissioner's website.

There is clear guidance on the "public interest test" available here. This details exactly how the test should be carried out and states:

The public interest test entails a public authority deciding whether, in relation to a request for information, it serves the interests of the public either to disclose the information or to maintain an exemption or exception in respect of the information requested. To reach a decision, a public authority must carefully balance opposing factors, based on the particular circumstances of the case. Where the factors are equally balanced, the information must be disclosed.

Well it was unclear how they could have done this especially as not only was the basis of this decision not disclosed to me in the decision letter but the person who made the decision told me she was "unfamiliar" with the library consultation and did not even know the date the consultation ended.

It turns out this was wrong as well. There is also guidance on issuing a refusal notice available from the ICO here . This states:

If the applied exemption is a qualified one to which the public interest test applies, the authority must assess whether: “in all circumstances of the case, the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information” and must state its detailed reasoning in the refusal notice.

So it turns out that I wasn't being unreasonable and annoying. The County Council were acting unlawfully in handling my request. I am awaiting a review of the decision. And an apology would be nice too.....

UPDATE 2015

The public interest test has now been sent to me and is now on Wikisuffolk. The PDF file metadata says it was created this morning but it is not clear if it was actually written earlier of if it was created "after the fact".

I don't think this test has been done properly as it does not state the arguments in favour and then against release and balance them off against each other.

I didn't get an apology but it was suggested to me that I might be an "unreasonable complainant" and a link to a policy about dealing with such people sent to me!!

Suffolk County Council refuse to release library consultation results until after decision is made

Suffolk County Council have today responded to a Freedom of Information Act request to publish the results of the ongoing library consultation by stating that they will not do this until after the Councils' Cabinet has met and made the decision on the future of libraries in July. This is despite the consultation ending at the end of April.

They claim to be doing this "in the public interest" and claiming an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act as follows:

This information is exemption under section 22 (future publication) of the FOIA.  Section 22 of the FOIA makes information exempt where it is intended for publication at a future date.  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. 

Asked to explain why it was in the public interest not to release the information the Council's FOI officer slipped up and said "it is not in the Council's interest to release the information". I asked for a copy of the public interest test and she claimed that they do not normally release them but would do in this case. I then asked her when the library consultation ended and she said she didn't know and that she "wasn't familiar" with the consultation.

I pressed for details of who had actually made the decision and the FOI officer claimed that it was her decision and then refused to answer further questions and put the phone down on me!

So far Suffolk claim to have received 1300 responses to the consultation and even issued a Press Release showing extracts from some of them.

I am still waiting for the public interest test to be sent to me an hour and a quarter after my call. I get the distinct impression they are probably writing it as I type.....

You can see the full FOI response on Wikisuffolk

Suffolk Library Consultation Project Manager Mike Ellwood admits lack of time and resources

Today the newly launched Wikisuffolk placed the full text of a document written by Mike Ellwood, Suffolk County Council's library consultation project manager in the public domain. 

The document is a report to the "MLA" (Government library quango) prepared Suffolk is part of the so-called Future Libraries Programme. The document appears to have been written just as the library consultation launched and is very revealing and perhaps shows why the library consultation has been such a failure.

Mike comments that:

We found that the time allocated to us to get the project up and running very tight. Ideally we would’ve liked a much longer time span to get the job planned out properly. It placed a lot of pressure on us to get things right first time. We also would’ve liked to have more time to get our own ideas down and talk to people. That would’ve provided us with firm evidence that what we propose is what the communities want.

 More people resource would also be helpful. We have a limited and reducing number of staff and this has taken up more staff time than we expected.

He then goes on to say:

The time pressure was very difficult and also because we were one of the first services in the County Council to be devolved, we've been racing ahead of other parts of the council and we need their input. There is also new legislation coming through from the Government.  There has been a lot of talk about staff being able to take over the running of the library services for example, but we haven’t got the information to tell them how to do it and that has been quite unsettling for the staff.

 There have been lots of questions around transfer of assets and procurement which we have had to try and answer as we went along. We have had to go to other parts of the Council for the answers and they have sometimes been lagging behind us or not come across the questions before. So it has been a steep learning curve. These have been the main barriers really.

 The decision was taken that we should be as open and transparent as possible and make available all the information we had to help potential providers come forward. The sheer volume of data that needed to be collated and presented in a useable form has been a considerable challenge.

I almost feel sorry for Mike after reading this but it explains why the consultation process has been such a mess. There have been problems with getting reliable data and a lack of staff resource in Suffolk County Council to do the job properly.

The ill-prepared, under-resourced consultation that has gone ahead despite any firm evidence of what communities want has gone about as well as could be expected.

Local library campaigners "warned off" as Suffolk County Council meet US company LSSI

Last month I joined a group of other library campaigners at The Endeavour House Meeting with Suffolk County Council. The meeting although clearly controlled by Cllr Judy Terry, Cabinet Lead for libraries was chaired by Anna McCreadie who is Suffolk's Interim Director for Adult and Community Services.

The outcome of the meeting was a number of actions on Suffolk CC which they have so far failed to deliver on. After some chasing last week we finally got a reply on progress from Anna McCreadie. The email didn't sound very friendly and seems to amount to us being "warned off":

Thank you for attending the meeting at Endeavour House on the 25 February 2011 in which we discussed your views and ideas regarding library services and the County Council’s consultation on the future of library services. I attach a note of the meeting.

Whilst I appreciate the passion with which you each hold your views about library services, any further work with us will need to be on a practical basis. I would be happy to hear from those of you who would like to work with county council library officers constructively on ideas for your local library services. I also expect that where you have fundamental objections to the consultation you will be making those clear by other means.

The irony is that everyone who attended the meeting is involved in developing constructive ideas just getting Suffolk to listen to them is becoming increasingly difficult.

Not so for the American company LSSI who having met Suffolk CC four times already are visiting libraries in Suffolk again this week...seems Suffolk would rather talk to them than local communities.