Tagged: Edinburgh Evening News
FOI Friday: Strange weapons, cost of a big fire, prison menus and revisiting attacks at hospitals
Newcastle Evening Chronicle: Reports compiled about big fire show concerns over safety equipment
EFFORTS to fight a giant blaze were hit by concerns over safety equipment.
Internal fire service documents seen by the Chronicle reveal the fire caused damage to the neck straps on firefighters’ breathing masks that did not meet required standards.
The fault was raised in a report compiled by chiefs and an investigation was recommended.
The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also reveal how the cost of the operation exceeded £50,000.
Details released under the Freedom of Information Act show police have confiscated hundreds of unusual items which have been used in attacks or deemed offensive weapons.
The haul also includes a pizza shovel, a quill pen and a pool ball in a sock.
Newcastle Journal: £4million seized back from criminals in North East
MORE than £4m was seized from North East criminals in just two years as police used court powers to strip them of their ill-gotten gains.
Criminals on Tyneside and in Northumberland paid back nearly £700,000 in cash while, following examinations by forensic accountants, fraudsters have also had to pay nearly £2.5m to cover the cost of their assets.
Financial investigators calculated the true value of their benefits to determine exactly what they owed from their businesses.
FOI Friday: FIFA costs, secret letters, mystery names and put down dogs
Oooh.. a secret
1. Asking for more than just numbers
It’s easy to fall into the trap of just asking for numbers and data under FOI – after all, there’s a heck of a lot to go after. But asking for correspondence between parties, or responses to consultations can often lead to excellent stories too.
To illustrate that point, here’s a story from the Fulham Chronicle, which began life in Inside Housing. The local council leader has been trying to get some flats demolished and, perhaps unsurprisingly, has run into problems from residents who quite like living in their houses. Inside Housing obtained a letter from the council leader to a government minister pleading for help:
Mr Greenhalgh scrawled ‘I really need your help on this’! at the end of a typed letter to minister for decentralisation Greg Clark regarding future of the West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estates. His letter to Mr Clark – obtained by Inside Housing magazine under the Freedom of Information Act – concerns the council’s bid to get the government to scrap legislation that would allow tenants to transfer ownership of their homes – of which 750 are earmarked for demolition – from the council to a housing association set up by themselves.
2. Top 10 most expensive police investigations
Mr Who?
The BBC reports on this week that the JobCentre is at it too to protect the identities of workers in difficult situations. They call them ‘office names.’ This one could run and run?
FOI Friday: Custard spills, charity finances, twocking – and an important breakthrough
Regional Development Agency assets
An important precedent has hopefully been set this week by the Birmingham Post when it comes to FOI. Regional Development Agencies were a relatively late addition to FOI coverage, and since their demise was announced, some have been reluctant to reveal how much they are selling their assets for.
The Birmingham Post this week revealed that Birmingham’s Stock Exchange, set up by Advantage West Midlands in 2007, has been sold for £1. In three years, it has swallowed £3million of public cash.
AWM at first refused to say how much it had been sold for, arguing it was commercially sensitive. The Post has managed to argue otherwie, and AWM changed its mind.
The front page of the Birmingham Post
According to the Warrington Guardian, a third of charities in the town are in the red after grants have been cut and recession hit donations. Reporter Hannah Bargery used FOI to ask the Charities Commission for details about charities in the Warrington borough. The figures she got back revealed that of the 389 registered charities in Warrington, 123 spent more than they received last year.
You may well have seen this story in the nationals this week but it began life as Monday’s splash in the Liverpool ECHO. FOI was used to ask councils for details of cases where pupils had brought compensation claims against schools. One pupil received £750 for being splashed with custard (presumably at lunchtime) while another got £6k for falling off a chair.
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FOI Friday: Uni expenses, shoplifting, driving tests and a speed camera success story
1. The expenses of university top bods
With £9,000 a year tuition fees very likely for many students starting university, there’s probably never been a better time to stick the finances of universities under the FOI microscope. The Sunday Sun has done just that, asking for the expenses of senior officials at universities in its areas:
UNIVERSITY bosses notched up more than £130,000 on credit cards and expenses in two years….on five-star hotels, posh restaurants and supermarket shopping.
A former Teesside University Deputy Vice Chancellor put £116 on the plastic during a trip to a Singapore boozer.
And Northumbria pro-vice chancellor, Professor Paul Croney, claimed for a £652 bill at a Hong Kong bar and restaurant.
The Sunday Sun asked five of the North’s universities – Northumbria, Newcastle, Durham, Teesside and Sunderland – to show us bills submitted by their Pro-Vice Chancellors and Deputy Vice Chancellors over the last two years, a request made under the Freedom of Information Act.
The figure – £132,494 spent by the 25 executives whose UK average salary tops £60,000 – has emerged in the week that Newcastle University announced they are planning to join Durham University by charging £9,000 tuition fees.
Can such expenses be tolerated when they are effectively been funded by higher tuition fees? Some of the best information lies in the smallest details:
More than half of that total [at Durham] covered a £44,225 ‘Travel Card’ bill for Professor Seth Kunin in the Arts and Humanities department.
And in Teesside – which seems to tell its top staff to buy food for events from supermarkets and claim it back – there was this gem:
Professor Cliff Allan – who has since left for another university – spent £12,509 in the two-years, staying at several five-star hotels in India and China, including The Imperial in New Delhi. He also spent £60.56 on his Barclaycard in Housams 1985 Ltd, a Middlesbrough DIY store – which the university said relates to three “minor items of office equipment”.
During a visit to Singapore in November 2009 he also spent £116.33 in the Cocoon Bar & Supperclub.
There’s a growing rumbling in university circles that universities should be exempt from FOI because they won’t be relying on the public purse directly in years to come. I think we all know that’s more than a little misleading.
To Crawley [and the Observer] we go for an old favourite – the speed camera FOI. I mention it here because Sussex Police has bucked a trend among police forces and revealed the location of the busiest speed camera – ie the one issuing the most tickets – and the number of tickets issued. Other police forces have said no in the past for various reasons, my favourite being the fear that such information could lead to vandalism. For anyone asking this question again, referring to Sussex in the FOI request might be a good idea.
The attacks against council big wigs go on – and the Chorley Guardian spotted one FOI-based national story which showed that four of their council’s officials, between them, earned £500,000. I mention this story here because it’s a good example of taking someone else’s FOI story further, and getting more out of it. In this case, the Guardian got the chief executive, Donna Hall, to open up her pay package to the paper which provided much more context.
Good stuff from the Coventry Telegraph which used FOI to find out various statistics from the Driving Standards Agency about driving tests in the Coventry area – including someone who had 25 attempts before passing!
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: Cops on desk duty, idle ambulances, data losses, council refurbishments and schoolchild crimes
'Ello, 'Ello, 'Ello - are you on the frontline or not?
The debate rages on about whether government cuts are going to hit frontline services or the just the fabled bloated back offices and the Manchester Evening News came up with a new angle into the discussion this week: the number of frontline police officers on the desk duties through illness. In total, 7per cent of the force’s police officers are on restrictive duties. (Source: Manchester Evening News)
There’s a newish offence of extreme pornography – and the Brighton Argus was quick off the mark to report on an FOI about the first arrests made under the law. According to their FOI request, three men were arrested on possession of extreme pornography. (Source: Brighton Argus)
Ambulances in Gwent, in South Wales, spent 20,000 hours over the last two years hanging around due to delays at hospitals, or 868 days. The cost is about £1.5million. Lost time is defined as anything above 20 minutes, and this information has to be recorded by ambulance trusts. Asking for the number of occasions an ambulance was delayed could also pay dividends. (Source: South Wales Argus)
20 FOI ideas to kick off 2011
There has been a spike in traffic coming to my blog this week using the search term ‘FOI ideas.’ Quiet first week back at the office maybe? So, here are 20 FOI ideas to kick off 2011, in no particular order. Happy new year!
1. Call outs to pubs and clubs
Which pubs and clubs have received the most calls from police? The Wilsmlow Express was able to name the venues in its area via FOI. A bit of a health warning should come with this FOI. A friend of mine runs a bar in a Lancashire town. His local paper ran a similar FOI and his bar came near to the top for call outs, but he says the figures included incidents where the venue was used as a landmark – eg an assault outside the bar. In some respects, this shouldn’t change the FOI because it’s the perception of danger which will matter to the reader. (Source: Wilmslow Express)
Councils up and down the country spend money on employing tax payer-funded political assistants for the main political parties. Good value for money? The Swindon Advertiser found it cost £80,000 a year in Swindon. (Source: Swindon Advertiser)
3. Taken to court for unpaid council tax
A good indicator of how the recession is impacting on people is getting hold of the number of people councils are taking to court for non payment of council tax. In Scotland, the figure is 350 A DAY. (Source: The Scotsman)
FOI FRIDAY: 10 things we’ve learnt this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act
From an increase in food poisoning due to the recession to the councillors who haven’t let the credit crunch reduce their appetite for free food, there’s been a very mixed bag of revelations thanks to FOI this week…
1. The health impact of the recession
The recession has been blamed for many things and, it would appear, you can add rocketing food poisoning cases to the list too. That’s what the Birmingham Mail discovered when it asked the city council for numbers of food poisoning cases in the city, along with the reports from all establishments which got the lowest possible score on its 0-5 scoring system.
2. How many speeding fines per speed camera?
Sticking in the West Midlands, the Wolverhampton Express and Star used FOI to report on how many speeding fines ‘safety’ cameras were issuing. The paper had doped to get the number of fines for each speed camera by location, but this part of the request was refused on the grounds it could lead to vandal attacks on those cameras. This seems a rather flimsy excuse, but at least they released the number of fines issued by the top 10 performing cameras, and which borough they were in. A challenge of the use of the Section 31 exemption (for grounds of law enforcement) might be interesting – is there a public interest reason for knowing how many fines each camera issues, and would this ensure that people slowed down?
3. Domestic violence and the World Cup
The Halifax Courier demonstrated well how to use the Freedom Of Information Act for both a topical story and one which requires quite specific data. It asked for the number of domestic attacks which took place in the area during the World Cup compared to the previous year. The police supplied the info – attacks 6% up.
Like this:
FOI Friday: 10 things we’ve learnt this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act
At a time when budgets are being slashed, spending at local authorities will come under greater scrutiny than ever. FOI is a powerful tool in this respect, as the Press and Journal in Aberdeen showed this week when it revealed how one council had spent £400,000 on more than 100 trips abroad.
2. The impact of winter vomiting
Yes, on the hottest week of the year, the Herald Express in Devon gets details, via FOI, on how many days over the past five years hospital wards have been shut by winter vomiting. 700 days in total – more than two years.
An interesting take on the impact of the recession is revealed by the Nidderdale Herald this week – a rise in the number of pauper’s funerals taking place in the area.
