Tagged: wales on sunday
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: Tonsils, waiting in ambulances, thefts from courts and some interesting emails
Courts were told to push for tougher sentences
When doing FOI Friday, I try and pick FOI stories which can be replicated elsewhere. Based on that criteria, including this story from The Guardian seems a bit odd. Basically, the Guardian got hold of court emails which encouraged magistrates to direct riot-related offences to crown court for sentence. The reason I’ve included it is because it demonstrates just how powerful FOI can be if you go beyond numbers and ask for documents. Emails can be a rich source of stories – from memos directing traffic wardens where to target for parking through to stuff like this.
There’s something particularly good about this use of FOI. Yes, it’s about hospital admissions relating to drink, but it’s just so thorough. The Sunday Sun reveals how the number of admissions to hospital for alcohol-related matters have rocketed in five years. But they also asked for age-group breakdown – those in their 40s and 50s are the biggest group – the youngest admissions, and a breakout for cases treated in A&E alone. Good stuff.
Life after the News of the World: Front pages from the regional Sunday newspapers
During today, I’ve seen a number of tweets from reporters and news editors heading into the office remarking how strange it is not to have the News of the World to go through when they get there.
Doing the Sunday newspapers is a thankless task. You spend a good couple of hours and it can yield nothing. And when there is a local story in the nationals, they tend to be terribly hard to stand up on a Sunday. And then if you are found to have missed a story….
But given the amount of interest in the how the national newspapers were responding to the first Sunday without the NOTW dominating the news stands, I thought it might be worth rounding up the front pages of the regional Sunday newspapers.
There’s no commentary to go with them, I just thought it might be interesting to share the ones I could get hold of on what is the start of a new era for Sunday titles. I’ll add more as I get them:
Sunday Sun - North East
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Wales on Sunday - Wales
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Sunday Mercury - Midlands
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Scotland on Sunday
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Sunday Mail, Scotland (Ok, I know it's a national but I thought I'd include it as it isn't done in London)
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Derry Journal
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Sunday Life
FOI Friday: Councils charging for phone calls, ministerial visits, school away days and abuse by carers
This week’s FOI Friday includes three at the bottom which I think could end up running and running all summer long…
1. Details behind hoax calls (Coventry Times)
Why would you use FOI to get details about fire brigade hoax calls when the fire brigade is normally so happy to help on this issue? Well, the Coventry Times certainly got a lot more information than I’ve seen in other place – such as the percentage of calls which were hoaxes, the number of fire engines sent to fake fires (five on one occasion) and some interesting details about a regular hoaxer.
2. Hospitals paying for funerals (Swindon Advertiser)
A slightly different take on the paupers funeral FOI request which lots of people did last year: The cost of public health funerals. These are funerals which have to be paid for by hospitals when someone who has died in hospital doesn’t have any relatives, or in some cases, relatives who don’t/can’t pay. In Swindon, there have been 40 such funerals since 2007.
3. Slashing mobile phone bill costs (Yorkshire Evening Post)
Lots of people have done FOI requests asking for the number of council staff with council-paid mobile phones, while lots of papers have done ‘shock, horror’ stories about the annual phone bills. But the Yorkshire Evening Post’s take is different. It got the total phone bills for each of three years and a huge drop was evident. Further investigation revealed it was to do with changing supplier. So while it’s not a scandal uncovered, perhaps it’s still an important story to demonstrate how councils can save money.
FOI Friday: 999 attacks, bin fines, obese babies and plastic surgery
Area-by-area crime rates – and how many are solved (Oxford Mail)
There’s been a lot of debate about how valuable, or otherwise, the police crime maps are. They tell you about crime a month later, aren’t that accurate when it comes to naming the location and won’t tell you if the crime has been solves.
The Oxford Mail has perhaps produced something of at least equal value with an FOI to Thames Valley Police asking for an area by area breakdown of crimes committed, and the percentage solved. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there’s quite a postcode lottery at play. I would imagine the key to getting a success with this FOI is to ask for the figures broken down by area the police recognise – eg a police beat or area.
Fines for leaving the bins out (South Wales Echo)
In a week when the weekly bin collection was dropped as a policy by the government in England, a timely story about fines for leaving your bins out if you live in Cardiff:
Hundreds of households have been fined by a council for leaving their wheelie bins and rubbish bags out on the wrong day, we can reveal.
Cardiff council issued £100 fines to 416 homes in the year between April 2010 and March 2011, a Freedom of Information request to the authority showed.
Noisy animals (Manchester Evening News)
According to the Manchester Evening News, town halls in Greater Manchester have received 2,000 complaints about noisy animals in the last year – including 100 about chickens.
Among the more offbeat noisy complaints was one about a vocal parrot in Bury.
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: Investigating business grants, frisky Welsh folk and the 104-year-old criminal
1. Spending money to talk about cuts
The Waltham Forest Guardian reports on an interesting spending choice at the local council – an £18,000 advertising campaign to tell people the council would protect local services which people care about. The campaign follows on from another £27,000 campaign to find out which services people wanted protecting.
2. Complaints against social workers
An interesting story from the Coventry Telegraph, which quotes a report obtained using FOI to reveal who makes complaints against social workers in the area. The most interesting fact is that 10% of complaints are made by young people about their care.
3. Partying on the university budget
I’m never sure whether the active use of FOI by politicians in Wales is a good thing or not – largely because I believe politicians only turn to FOI when they are being denied access to information through other channels which they perhaps have a right to request information through. Either way, an Assembly member in Wales used FOI to find out how much universities were spending on hospitality – four in South Wales clocked up £6.4million over three years. One to chew over?
FOI FRIDAY: Murder warnings, data protection, hospital art – and asking for documents
Getting the background on cuts
A good example of why it always pays to ask for the documents related to important spending decisions. An organisation called the Friends of Sonning Common Library is fighting to keep its library, one of three Oxfordshire County Council wants to close. It used FOI to ask for the documents the council had prepared related to the closure, and when these arrived, they revealed that the council felt closing them would “not fully address socio-economic need” and “not fully address rural isolation”. In other words – people will be left more isolated. (Source: Henley Standard)
Police data protection breaches
Data protection breaches revelations were all the rage a couple of years ago, but here’s proof that they are still happening. The Sunday Sun in the North East reports on 100 cases of data protection breaches in the region, including one case where a community support officer is accused of passing on details to criminals. (Source: Sunday Sun)
Wales on Sunday used FOI well to get hold of the amount of money paid out in grants to football, rugby union and cricket from the Welsh government. While it probably came as no surprise that rugby union received £1.5million, it did cause shock that welsh cricket received even more – while football in Wales got just £7,735. Given the scrutiny of public money at the moment, asking councils how much they have given in grants to different sports could generate good stories. (Source: Wales on Sunday)
FOI Friday: Speed cameras, fines in a free car park, under-aged sex and naughty BBC employees
1. Fun with speed camerasAuthorities such as councils and police forces have been very reluctant to divulge information about speed cameras in recent times. For example, West Midands Police refused to reveal which cameras made the most cash for fear of vigilante attacks on the cameras involved. But Wales on Sunday managed to get some useful information out of police forces in Wales, asking how many cameras were active (ie switched on) on a chosen date.
2. Cost of closing a development agency
For all the coalition government talk about development agencies not providing value for money, there’s been little discussion of the cost of winding them up. One way to look at the cost of closing something down is to ask for the redundancy costs. The Lancashire Telegraph reports on an FOI request which revealed the redundancy bill at the North West Development Agency currently stands at £1.8million. Every little helps, and all that….
3. Fined for parking in a free car park
The Wokingham Times, like many newspapers, FOI’d the local council to find out how many parking tickets had been issued by the council and where. But it went beyond the top-line ‘total number’ of tickets in the story which followed, pointing out some interesting facts such as the number of tickets issued in car parks which were designated as free. Local knowledge + good FOI = better story?
At a time when councils are (rightly) pleading poverty, it’s worth asking how much they have in the bank as a result of Section 106 planning conditions – money developers have to pay the council to carry our improvements in an area as a result of a new development. For example, many councils will ask for money towards a new play park. The Bristol Evening Post did that and found there was £5million sat in the bank – it also reported where the money was meant to be spent.
FOI Friday: 10 things we’ve learnt this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act
Befordshire Police ‘rented out’ its officers to no fewer than 33 organisatons, reports Luton Today, thanks to and FOI request, including town centre committees, the local hospital and a parish council. The FOI went to the local police force.
You’d like to think if an organisation such as the Royal College of Paediatrics was asked to investigate problems at a hospital after the death of a child, it would be a given that said report must be made public. Apparently not, according to the BBC, which says such a report at a hospital in Birmingham was only made public after its FOI request. Worth noting if your hospital has suspicious deaths.
I did a similar FOI to this in 2008 – asking Merseyside health authorities how many times they turned down people for drugs which consultants said should be funded by the NHS. The fact that the problem is still so bad in some areas, as reported by the Oxford Mail, is quite shocking.
