Information Governance Report

Responses to Requests

Period: 01/05/2012- 31/05/2012

Type / Sub Enquiry ID / Date Received / Date Responded / Service / Enquiry Details / Response Details
Public / 12331 / 14/03/2012 / 01/05/2012 / Corporate Contracts / Subject: Framework agreement
1. Is it inclusive of all works that any of the councils
involved may require over the course of its duration? Is
it only for works on housing?
2. What is the start date and duration of the
agreement?
3. What contracts have been awarded to Crispin &
Borst, if any, under this agreement? / Summary:
1. Is it inclusive of all works that any of the councils involved may require over the course of its duration? Is it only for works on housing?
The framework in question covered both management of and works in relation to empty properties in the private sector, and was available to all local authorities within the ELRP group of authorities (East London Renewal Partnership).
The framework is now administered by the East London Housing Partnership Team based in LB Barking & Dagenham.
2. What is the start date and duration of the agreement?
May 2009 for 4 years.
3. What contracts have been awarded to Crispin & Borst, if any, under this agreement?
None.
Political / 12487 / 30/03/2012 / 01/05/2012 / Home Improvement Agency / Subject: Disabled Facilities Grant
As Labour’s Shadow Minister for Care and Older People, I am undertaking a survey of local authority care services in order to understand what is happening on the frontline.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, please provide me with answers to the questions about the Disabled Facilities Grant included in the attached questionnaire.
Under the Act, I am entitled to a response within 20 working days of your receipt of this email, but I would appreciate it if you tried to provide me with a response to the survey by 10 th April.
I would prefer to receive this information electronically. If the decision is made to withhold some of this data using exemptions within the Act, please inform me of that fact and cite the exemptions used. / Summary:
See attached.
Public / 12518 / 03/04/2012 / 01/05/2012 / Chief Executive and CE’s Office / Subject: Weather maintenance
I would be most grateful if you could disclose how much money was spent on weather forecasting services for the purpose of winter maintenance for:
Winter 2010-11
Winter 2011-12 / Summary:
Please see the requested amounts detailed below
1. £4,860 plus VAT
2. £4, 617 plus VAT
Public Bodies / 12502 / 04/04/2012 / 01/05/2012 / CYPS - Schools Traded Services / Subject: Admission appeal
1. Details of the total number of pupils currently on the roll and also the number of pupils in each academic year at present?
2. The net capacity assessment of the school and the calculation used to ascertain the school's published admissions number
3. The details of the number of classrooms available for use by each of the year groups and the dimensions of each of those classrooms.
4. Confirmation of all the social space available at the school, including toilet blocks, dining space, sports hall and other similar activities.
5. Details of the number of children on the roll with additional needs and special educational needs and how these children are divided between the year groups.
6. The details of the number of staff planned to be available for teaching in the academic year 2012 - 13 including teaching assistants and how these are distributed between each of the class bases; and,
7. Details of how places were allocated within the school and how these allocation criteria applied. / Summary:
1. Details of the total number of pupils currently on the roll and also the number of pupils in each academic year at present?
We do not hold this information. It is advised that you contact the school directly as they would hold this information.
2. The net capacity assessment of the school and the calculation used to ascertain the school's published admissions number.
Please find attached the net capacity assessment for PlashetSchool.
3. The details of the number of classrooms available for use by each of the year groups and the dimensions of each of those classrooms.
Please find attached the Accommodations schedule for PlashetSchool, which details the number of classrooms available within the school. The existing school is shown in the grey columns.
It should however be noted that classrooms are not designated for use by specific year groups as they are often shared between different years, for different lessons. Therefore it is not possible to provide the number of classrooms for use by a specific year group.
We do not hold information in respect of the dimensions of each classroom. The Accommodations schedule does however provide the classroom area in square metres.
4. Confirmation of all the social space available at the school, including toilet blocks, dining space, sports hall and other similar activities.
Please find attached the Comparative Areas schedule which deals the square meterage of areas of the school which are not used for teaching purposes.
5. Details of the number of children on the roll with additional needs and special educational needs and how these children are divided between the year groups.
We do not hold this information. It is advised that you contact the school directly as they would hold this information.
6. The details of the number of staff planned to be available for teaching in the academic year 2012 - 13 including teaching assistants and how these are distributed between each of the class bases.
We do not hold this information. It is advised that you contact the school directly as they would hold this information.
7. Details of how places were allocated within the school and how these allocation criteria.
The following information relates to the allocation of school places for PlashetSchool for Year 7 admissions in September 2012.
The first six places were offered to girls with special educational needs considerations.
The next 59 places were offered to girls who had siblings at the school and whom reasonably expected to still be on roll at the time of the Year 7 child's admission.
The remaining 205 places were offered to girls who did not have a sibling at the school. As there were more girls in this category than places remaining the home to school distance tie break had to be applied. We can confirm the home to school distance of the girl offered the final place was 1.034 miles.
Public / 12469 / 26/04/2012 / 01/05/2012 / DP- Repairs / Subject: Council Housing Maintenance Budget and Procurement policy
1. How many council homes does your authority manage.
2. Please provide the total budget spend on housing maintenance and repairs to managed council housing properties in the financial years 2008/09, 2009/10, 2010/11.
3. Please provide the total budget spend of housing maintenance and repairs to managed council housing properties in the financial years 2008/09, 2009/10, 2010/11 completed by:
a) Medium sized enterprises
b) Small sized enterprises
c) Micro sized enterprises
Definition of these categories provided in the following link and the below table, any of the three criteria can be used to categorise the enterprise.
4 . Is it a policy requirement of your authority when awarding a contract for housing maintenance works that the contract value must be less than 20% of the total company turnover? Yes or No
5 .What policies and initiatives do you have in place to encourage Small and Medium sized enterprises to bid for housing repairs and maintenance contracts, and please can you provide any documentation you may have in this area. / Summary:
1.The authority directly manages 15,191 tenanted properties and 4,911 leasehold properties.
2.The total budget spend on housing maintenance and repairs to managed Council housing properties is shown in the table below:
2008/092009/102010/11
£££
Responsive Repairs7,747,737.007,205,843.00
7,210,024.00
Planned5,623,552.00
5,321,409.00
5,333,674.00
Total13,371,289.0012,527,252.00
12,543,699.00
3.The breakdown of the total budget spend of housing maintenance and repairs by enterprise is shown in the table below:
2008/092009/102010/11
£%£%£%
In-House DLO7,498,546.00568,680,176.00
709,203,010.0073
Medium Sized Companies Minimum2,371,000.00
181,796,000.00
141,842,000.0015
Small & Micro Sized Companies Minimum3,501,743.00262,051,076.00161,498,690.0012
Total13,371,289.0012,527,252.00
12,543,699.00
4.The Council has no formal policy, there are guideline procedures that Finance use when assessing the financial records of a company. Here, the 20% of turnover rule is applied, which result in the value of contract award number that is held within the NECTR (Newham's Electronic Contract & Tendering Resource) System.
5.Whilst the council cannot do anything to encourage SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) that might be deemed as providing any form of uncompetitive preference to those SMEs against larger companies, the Council does give SMEs the same choices and opportunities to tender for relevant works. All companies, regardless of size, are invited to pre-register on the Newham Electronic & Tender Resource system (NECTR). Upon registration and successful completion of the registration questionnaire. companies will be qualified to take part in relevant tender opportunities. Fully registered companies will also be notified via the NECTR bulletin board of any relevant new, open tender opportunities and be notified as to when and to who contracts have been awarded.
Media / 12500 / 03/04/2012 / 03/05/2012 / Human Resources / Subject: Trade union facility time
1.I would like a breakdown (union by union) of how much the council spent in the 2011/12 financial year on trade union facility time for reps, officials, conveners and other similar roles for the following unions:
National Union of Teachers
NASUWT
Association of Teachers and Lecturers
Association of School and College Leaders
National Association of Head Teachers
Voice
Unison
GMB
Unite
2:
I would also like a breakdown, for each of the unions below, of how many reps, officials, conveners and other workers belonging to the above unions benefited from facility time paid for by the authority in the 2011/12 financial year:
National Union of Teachers
NASUWT
Association of Teachers and Lecturers
Association of School and College Leaders
National Association of Head Teachers
Voice
Unison
GMB
Unite / Summary:
1& 2) Please see below the salaries paid in 2011/12 for all the full time release staff elected to Unison, GMB and Unite, which represents the cost to the council for the facility time to all the three main unions:
GMB: 2 x Full Time Release Staff
Unite: 2 x Full Time Release Staff
Unison: 2 x Full Time Release Staff
TOTAL: 6 Full Time Releases, total salary paid = £203,646.00.
Please note the below salaries are funded from the Dedicated Schools Budget and not from the Council's General Fund:
NUT: 1.8 x Full time officials
NASUWT: 0.4 x Full time official
NAHT: 0.4 x Full time official
ASCL: 0
ATL: 0
Voice: 0
Total = 2.6 full time officials, total salary paid = £152,999.00.
Please note we are unable to provide the precise salary for each staff member as this could result in their identification which would be a breach of there data protection rights as the salaries of individuals (especially junior staff) are personal data and therefore protected under the Data Protection Act.
Section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 provides an absolute exemption where disclosure of personal data about individuals would contravene any of the data protection principles set out in the Data Protection Act. Therefore there is no requirement to consider the public interest test in disclosure.
Media / 12517 / 03/04/2012 / 03/05/2012 / Trading Standards / Subject: Illegal Bush meat
I would like to know how many cases of illegal bush meat have been investigated by your Trading Standards officers in the last two years.
I would also like to know if any of these animals were an endangered animals covered by the CITES legislation and if so what this animal was. / Summary:
No cases have been investigated by Trading Standards in relation to 'illegal bush meat'.
Public / 12718 / 03/04/2012 / 03/05/2012 / Parking Fines / Subject: Challenges regarding tickets
1. How many challenges has the Council received for failing to display in which the challenge claimed a valid ticket which was not visible to the parking attendant?
2. To disclose all correspondence and other material relating to the choice to implement a parking management system based on non-sticky tickets. / Summary:
1) We are unable to extract this information from our systems as when an informal/ formal representation is received it is not categorised according to the 'type' of representation being made (i.e. ticket not visible).
In 2011 alone, we received 25,254 informal challenges and 28,719 formal representations. Therefore to obtain this information would require an Officer to manually interrogate all representations received and determine the reason for challenging the ticket. This would greatly exceed the appropriate time limit.
Under the Freedom of Information Act the Council has a right to refuse a request for information held if the cost of complying with a request exceeds the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for local authorities is £450 or 2.5 days or 18 hours. We believe in this case such an exemption applies and has decided to refuse your request for information under section 12(1) of the Act.
12 Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
(1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.
2) The decision was made to use non adhesive tickets due to the adhesive tickets getting caught within the machine mechanism and therefore taking the machine out of action, this was the case in both summer and winter where the climate changed and the tickets either got warm or cold and affected the adhesive and got caught up in the machine.
The change was designed to give the customer a range of fully functional machines. The decision to change came due to a large number of machines failing due to this fault.
We do not hold any correspondence, meeting minutes or any other material regarding this decision.
Voluntary Sector / 12519 / 04/04/2012 / 04/05/2012 / Adult Services (FOI) / Subject: Hepatitis C
1. Please confirm or deny whether there is a lead for hepatitis C in the local authority.
2. Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has a strategy in place for managing hepatitis C in its area.
3. Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has arrangements with the relevant primary care trusts to ensure coordination of hepatitis C commissioning in its area.
4. Please confirm or deny whether the local authority sits on a hepatitis C clinical
5) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has provided any guidance to local health and wellbeing boards on hepatitis C.
6) Please confirm or deny whether an assessment of the current and future burden of hepatitis C in its area has been undertaken by the local authority.
7) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has developed an estimate of the number of people diagnosed with hepatitis C each year in its area. / Summary:
1) Please confirm or deny whether there is a lead for hepatitis C in the local authority.
There is not a lead for Hepatitis C within Newham Council. The management of Hepatitis C does not fall within the remit of the Council. We suggest contacting the NHS directly should you require any further information on this subject:

2) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has a strategy in place for managing hepatitis C in its area.
There is not a strategy in place.
3) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has arrangements with the relevant primary care trusts to ensure coordination of hepatitis C commissioning in its area.
We have no arrangements.
4) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority sits on a hepatitis C clinical network.
No, we do not.
5) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has provided any guidance to local health and wellbeing boards on hepatitis C.
We have not provided any guidance.
6) Please confirm or deny whether an assessment of the current and future burden of hepatitis C in its area has been undertaken by the local authority.
An assessment has not been undertaken.
7) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has developed an estimate of the number of people diagnosed with hepatitis C each year in its area.
No we do not.
Voluntary Sector / 12520 / 04/04/2012 / 04/05/2012 / Adult Services (FOI) / Subject: Hepatitis C
8. Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has developed any local awareness raising campaigns on hepatitis C.
9. Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has worked with the local NHS to develop any local testing campaigns on hepatitis C.
10. Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has any data on the number of people tested for hepatitis C in its area.
11. Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has any targeted meas / Summary:
8) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has developed any local awareness raising campaigns on hepatitis C.
We have not raised campaigns on hepatitis C.
9) Please confirm or deny whether the local authority has worked with the local NHS to develop any local testing campaigns on hepatitis C.
We have not worked with the NHS to develop campaigns.