Tagged: Cambridge News
FOI Friday: Council workers earning less than a living wage, mental health wards and publicly-funded competitions
1. The impact of the closure of mental health wards -Burnley Express
This FOI from the Burnley Express really impressed me because it illustrates brilliantly how FOI can be used to paint a fuller picture than an organisation would otherwise seek to reveal. Lancashire Care NHS Trust, the mental health trust for Lancashire, plans to end all in-patient mental health care at Burnley General Hospital. Some patients will be moved to Preston – around a 60 to 70 mile round trip – and in 2014, dementia care will move to a site near Blackpool, almost a 100-mile round trip.
The trust argues it is about improving services for patients – but how many patients will be affected? That was the nub of the Express FOI, which is well explained in the article because it does what few FOI articles do – revealing what questions they asked before going into the answers.
Figures for the final six months of last year show the three wards in Burnley and the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit were very busy. The PICU ward was 91.2% full, two of the others were at full or over full, at 99% and 102%, and the third was 56% full.
According to the Trust, 472 teenagers have been admitted to the PICU ward in the last five years. 489 patients were admitted with dementia.
The new Blackpool development, a car boot sale site at Wyndyke Farm, off Preston New Road, is expected to open in 2014. Its 30 dementia and 16 PICU beds will serve the whole of Lancashire. The Trust says it is reducing dementia care in hospital because of developments in community services.
The numbers rather suggest that there won’t be enough beds, and those that there are will be up to 50 miles away. The numbers from the FOI request show, if nothing else, that there’s no numerical reason for closing the wards. Change for change sake?
2. Council’s dog poo crackdown is well, you know – Kidderminster Shuttle
Here’s a good example of FOI enabling residents to hold a council to account. The Kidderminster Shuttle probably covered the launch of the local council’s crackdown on dog poo – I imagine it warranted a press release. Shame, then, that a year on, and FOI reveals little action materialised.
3. Illegal gypsy sites – Burton Mail
When an illegal gypsy camp appears near someone’s house, the council is normal the first place that person calls for help. The Burton Mail used FOI to find out how many such camps had been reported in the last three years in their area – almost 100.
4. The impact of new parking rules – Birmingham Post
Parking tickets are often the subject of FOI requests – but here’s a different take on how to do it. The Birmingham Post used FOI to find out how many more tickets had been issued following the extension of parking rules to cover evenings and Sundays. The number of tickets issued has risen 74% – a nice little earner some might say.
5. Police cuts confirmed – Halifax Courier
The coalition government promised that frontline police officers would not be cut as police budgets were reduced. That doesn’t appear to be the case in Calderdale, where the Halifax Courier used FOI to reveal where the cuts were falling.
6. Council competitions – Wales on Sunday
I’ve seen loads of councils runs competitions with prizes and thought to myself ’that’s probably a waste of money’ but I’ve never thought of suggesting it as an FOI and aggregating the results though. Wales On Sunday have though – and it does ask some questions.
7. Council workers living under the breadline – Wigan Evening Post
Here’s a clever idea from the Wigan Evening Post - start asking local authorities how many members of staff earn less than the Living Wage – a figure calculated by the the Living Wage Unit to reflect the actual cost of living, rather than just the minimum wage. At Wigan Council, one in five earn less than £7.20.
8. Car crime by ward – Cambridge News
Among the many FOI stories you see about crime stats, it’s not often you come across one about car crime, but this article from the Cambridge News is worth a look – it breaks car crime down by ward. Is car crime important? Probably to those in the hotspot area, it is.
9. Missile-throwing yobs – Nottingham Post
I don’t normally include FOI stories which begin life on a press release, but this one was particularly well-timed from Autoglass, the windscreen repair people. It lists the number of missile attacks on cars by police force, timely given the spate of concrete throwing which has made the front pages.
10. How good are councils as employers? – Bradford Telegraph and Argus
There are 67 cases before or recently dealt with by employment tribunal involving Bradford Council staff. Two resulted in combined payouts of £100,000. A sign of a good employer or a bad one? The number being settled out of court suggests we’ll never know.
FOI Friday: Unusual council waiting lists, a housing crisis, and the theft of a six-foot cardboard copper
1. Police officers disciplined for racism
Proof of the value of FOI disclosure logs – for journalists anyway. The BBC reports on seven police officers from West Mercia Police disciplined for racism. The BBC, which used the infamous ‘BBC has learnt’ in the intro, confirms later in the piece it found the information on West Mercia’s disclosure log.
2. Life-sized copper stolen from police station
I know the ‘things stolen from a police station’ FOI has been done a lot, but I wanted to include this one, simply because of what was stolen. According to the Bucks Free Press:
The catchphrase ‘you’re nicked’ has been spun on its head by daring thieves who pinched items including a life-size cut-out of a copper from police.
The six-foot tall cardboard crime deterrent was put under the long arm of a crook at a police station in the Wycombe LPA, information obtained by the Bucks Free Press reveals.
A truncheon and ‘five blue strobe flashing lights’, likely to be from a police car, were also nabbed from Wycombe police along with an item marked ‘other’.
FOI Friday: Dog poop, online browsing, police response times and racism in schools
1. What public sector workers look at online
I think it’s safe to say this one could run, and run, and run. A freedom of information request to the Department for Transport revealed the top 1,000 most visited websites from Department for Transport computers. Some amusing surprises in there.
2. Alternative therapies in schools
According to a freedom of information request reported in the Birmingham Mail, schools in the city have spent £1.5million on alternative therapies for staff and pupils, including massages. The firms paid the cash was called Herriots and Millward.
3. Data Protection Act breaches in police forces
The Manchester Evening News this week revealed that a memory stick containing details of drugs informants had been stolen in a burglarly from a police officer’s house. Greater Manchester Police was so keen for the public’s help in cracking this case that it didn’t even mention it for over a week. Coincidentally, an FOI request from the Cambridge News demonstrates the value of using FOI to ask police forces for the number of Data Protection Act breaches. 12 staff were caught breaking DPA rules, including one person putting information on Facebook. If ever you’ve done the ‘lost and stolen data’ FOI, it might be worth broadening it out in future to include any DPA breaches.
FOI Friday: Nightstalker, OAP abuse, crime in villages and shredded letters
The conviction of Delroy Grant, the Nightstalker sex attacker who police failed to catch despite being given a golden opportunity to do so, has been headline news this week. The News Shopper in London took the opportunity to republish an invesitgation it conducted into the hunt for the Nightstalker prior to Grant’s arrest.
Reporter Linda Grant used FOI to ask how many suspects had been arrested or interviewed (none at the time), and had cost £102,000 to process 2,054 DNA samples. The Met, however, refused to tell the paper how many additional crimes they were attributing to the Night Stalker at the time. A good example of FOI to shed light on an active case.
We see a lot of FOIs relating to abuse of children, but the Evening Gazette in Teesside reports on cases of abuse to elderly people by council-employed carers. Abuse reports included financial abuse, verbal abuse and a case of medication error.
The village where no crimes are solved
The village of Hagley, near Bromsgrove, was scene of 30 vehicle crimes and 29 burglaries last year. None were solved. The figures were obtained using FOI and published by the Bromsgrove Advertiser – a clever use of FOI to get two sets of data which paint a very interesting picture.
Crimes committed in police stations
Police stations are proving to be fascinating places for FOI requests. Following on from break ins at police stations and thefts from police stations comes this one from the Bristol Evening Police: The 226 crimes committed inside police stations – over half of which were for criminal damage. A few arsons too. You can see a similar request from GetReading here.
The other things seized at court
Remember the FOI about the number of knives seized at court? The Gloucester Citizen follows a similar line, but chose to ask for a list of everything seized at court from visitors. As well as knives and blades, screwdrivers, CS sprays and darts were also seized, along with cameras and recorders
If ever there was one job which was likely to provoke abuse, it’s the role of traffic warden. And so it seems in Swansea, where the South Wales Evening Post reports on 73 reported attacks on traffic wardens, the worst of which involved knocking down a traffic warden and driving off.
Kidnapping is a crime which is quite rare, and therefore tends to make the headlines when it happens. In Cambridgeshire, the Evening News used FOI to find out how often kidnaps were reported, and what the motives were, and how long people were held for. The resulting article is a fascinating insight into some unusual crimes.
THE number of cyclists in Wales fined for riding on the pavements has more than quadrupled since 2008. A total of 318 people were given £30 fixed penalty notices in 2010, compared to just 54 in 2008, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Royal Mail’s love of the shredder
The Royal Mail initially refused to reveal how many letters it destroys a year, on the grounds it would cause negative publicity, but later relented and revealed it shreds 25 million letters year.
And here’s one to keep an eye on. Tory MP Robert Halfon has FOI’d 100 top universities to see how many of them have received donations from ‘Middle East sources’. First to be revealed this way is Durham University, which took £11,000 from Iran, and a total of £700,000 from the region.
FOI Friday: Boozy toddlers, rats on the run, football debt & councillors dodging tax
The Sunday Mercury used FOI to ask local hospitals the ages of those aged 12 or under who were treated for booze addiction, and the total number. One child was aged just three, and a total of 107 under 12s in the region were treated.
Don’t all shout ‘We’ve done this one before’ just yet. The Lynn News in Norfolk reports this week on the number of parking fines dished out by the local hospital to people who hadn’t purchased the correct parking ticket – paying for parking at hospitals is a contentious issue in itself. Around 3,000 fines were issued – of which just half were paid. A wasted paper exercise?
Blog Preston came up with different way of serving up details of rat populations in the city. Whereas many reporters have got year-on-year figures through FOI to report on the growth in rat call outs by local councils, Blog Preston sought the data for each ward – painting a much sharper picture of the problem at a local level.
FOI Friday: Bed blocking, council ad spending, smoke alarms and police accidents
Not one for those who find Casualty squeamish: The Cynon Valley Leader reports on the reaasons why hospitals call out pest control services. Rats, mice, flies and bugs have all been reported at a cost of £258k.
Here’s an interesting statistic found under FOI: the percentage of fire service call outs to houses which didn’t have a smoke alarm. Answer in North Somerset? : 39%. That surprised me as being quite high? (Source: Weston Mercury)
Councils spending money to warn how bad cuts will be
Ok, so The Sun has a political agenda but this FOI is still worth mentioning. They used FOI to ask councils how much they had spent on publicity to warn people of the impact of funding cuts. More than £220k has been spent by 47 councils combined. (Source: The Sun)
Police car accidents … in their own car parks
The Crewe Chronicle reports on an FOI which revealed that Cheshire Police has spent £63k repairing cars involved in 141 bumps which took place in their oen car parks. Details of some of the bumps make for interesting reading.
Workplace compensation payments for council staff
Councils will often offer up information on how much they spend on settling no win, no fee claims from members of the public for trips and slips, but what about the amount they spend on settling claims from staff? The Edinburgh Evening News reports on £10million in payouts in recent years.
A different way to establish the impact of the recession is to look at crime figures. The most obvious one is shoplifting, and the Northampton Chronicle reports on 3,000 peole caught shoplifting. It’s a crime many newspapers overlook normally, but put in context of tough trading conditions, it perhaps has a more important perspective.
Cumbria County Council staff visited eight countries in two years on official business, the News and Star in Carlisle revealed using FOI. The cost, however, was just £2,746 as most trips were paid for by external organisations. Still, quite why 12 headteachers had to visit Denmark to learn how children move from infant to junior school is bemusing.
Ride and run crimes involve people getting a cab ride and running off at the end without paying. The Cambridge News used FOI to find out that there were 70 such incidents in Cambridge last year, according to police. Cabbies say the problem is much worse.
Covered on this blog more than once before, but worth flagging up again, is the bed blocking FOI. Hospitals keep details of how many ‘bed days’ are lost to bedblocking, and it is possible they can say how long the longest bed blocking case has gone on for. In North Wales, it’s two years. (Source: Daily Post North Wales)
In this job-short times, you’d think there wouldn’t be much call for a recruitment consultant when a council wanted to find a new chief executive. The Evening Chronicle reports on a £22k spend on consultants to find a new chief executive, only to get 20 applicants and then decide none were suitable.
FOI Friday: CCTV in high schools, parking charges, bad tickets and swine flu
1. CCTV cameras in secondary schools
Submitting FOI requests to schools can be endurance test compared to approaching a local education authority for summary information they hold – but it can be worth it, as this story from the Coventry Telegraph proves. It used FOI to ask secondary schools how many CCTV cameras they had and where they were placed. One school revealed it had 112 cameras, roughly one for every 10 pupils. (Source: Coventry Telegraph)
2. Luxury cars at a time of cuts
Durham Police says it needs to save £6million and has just made 86 people redundant as part of government cuts. It also plans to have 110 fewer police officers. But the Northern Echo has reported on an FOI which revealed that £100k was spent on four luxury cars for senior officers. (Source: Northern Echo)
3. Paying extra parking charges
PARKING ticket machines kept almost £100,000 for Mole Valley Council last year by not giving change, the Advertiser newspaper reported. It used FOI to ask the council to reveal the total value of parking charges in council car parks, and how much was actually paid. There was a £100k difference, attributed by shopkeepers to the fact a lot of parking costs £1.80 for two hours, rather than £2 – and the machines don’t give change. (Source: Thisissurreytoday).
FOI Friday (On a Tuesday?): Knives in court, World Cup bid costs and councillor pay rises
I didn’t get round to writing this on Friday – so it’s late. But hopefully, still worthwhile…
Where’s the one place you might not expect crime to be committed? We’ve already established that police stations are prone to crime, but what about courts? The Lancashire Evening Post used FOI to find out how many knives were found on people going into courts in Lancashire – more than 200.
2. Things that go bump in the night
The Cambridge News reports on an FOI request which reveals the number of reports made to the police about ghostly sightings. Twelve reports have been made in the last two years, with details of each case reported.
3. Cost of the World Cup bid to councils
With the World Cup bid now little more than a wrecked dream, the Birmingham Mail has been quick to find out how much it cost local councils, given that Birmingham was battling to be a host city. Birmingham spent £350,000 – news which will no doubt cheer the 7,000 council staff currently facing the axe.
FOI Friday: Legal aid for a murderer, teachers unchecked, wheelie bins and … top pothole streets
Legal aid for a man convicted of murder
The Belfast Newsletter reports on the outrage caused by revelations that £800,000 was spent on legal aid for a man convicted of murder – a figure which is expected to rise now the man concerned is expected to appeal.
In the classroom without a CRB check
The East Anglian Daily Times used FOI to ask Suffolk County Council how many teachers began teaching without having had the full criminal record checks. 61 teachers this term in 47 schools were involved, a decline on 211 last year.
Streets with the worst pothole problems
The Shields Gazette used FOI to find out how much the local council had spent fixing potholes, but also asked for the streets with the worst pothole problems, presumably determined by number of potholes which needed to be filled in.
Councils in many areas insist on residents have wheelie bins, but appear to have a lucrative sideline in selling the bins when new people move in or when the bins are lost/stolen (‘fire in wheelie bin’ was a daily nib on several newspapers I’ve worked on). The Inverness Courier found that its local council had charged £160k from selling bins in recent years.
FOI FRIDAY: Cuts, cuts and cuts – 10 FOI stories connected to spending
With the spending cuts being brought into sharp focus this week, I thought it’d be a good idea to look at some of the spending-related Freedom of Information requests which have made headlines in recent weeks. At a time when every pound spent is being accounted for, using FOI to keep the public informed of how cash has been used has probably never been more important….
1. The £25,000 website which attracts just 10 visitors a day
Starting this week with the Saddleworth News hyperlocal blog, run by journalist Richard Jones. Richard’s FOI to Oldham Council asked how much was spent on the Oldham Says website, which is run by the local strategic partnership, the sort of ‘multi agency’ partnership which exists in most parts of the country. Just 10 visitors a day suggests they could do better.
2. The doctor paid £5,000 for one shift
The NHS is to see its budget increased but has been challenged to ensure that spending goes to the frontline. The Express and Star in Wolverhampton used FOI to find out how much was spent on agency staff, such as nurses and doctors, and appears to have asked for the single largest payment for one shift too. That figure made the story – £5k for a 24-hour shift in A&E.
Cost-cutting is already taking effect in Scotland, it would appear. The Scotsman asked for details of all taxi journeys made over the past five years – and found £1.5m had been spent by the Scottish Government on journeys, including £129k on taxi journeys which went just 2.3miles between the Scottish Government’s two bases in Edinburgh. The advice from the Scottish Government to officers now is: “Get the bus.”
