'National embarrassment' - Liverpool Council slammed despite £1m investment

Last month, the city council was hit with a sanction by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after recording a less than acceptable response rate to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, some of which were deemed as “lost”.

The local authority was hit with an enforcement notice over its performance by the ICO which is the UK’s independent regulator for data protection and information rights.

The notice was served in response to the council’s performance on dealing with the number of FOI requests that have not been answered within the required 20 working days and the backlog of requests the council currently has. The council’s performance led to it being branded a “national embarrassment” by opposition chief Cllr Carl Cashman.

The slap down by the ICO requires the council to clear its backlog of 70 cases by January 8 or face being held in contempt of court. Now, a new plan has identified what it describes as the “root cause” of the poor performance and outlined how the Cunard administration aims to turn things around.

In its lessons learnt and improvement plan, Iolanda Puzio, the city’s director of law and governance and monitoring officer, said the council has already taken a number of steps over the past two years to address some of the challenges in this area.

These included investing more than a quarter of a million pounds to increase resources. However, Ms Puzio admitted this had not been enough.

She said: “The council recognises that the impact of these changes had not taken effect, and it must continue to focus its efforts on ensuring improvement progress and implement these changes in a way which ensures sustained improvement.”

The monitoring officer’s assessment found how on occasion, the council’s information governance services “fail to spot FOI requests and deal them in a timely way or simply don’t know what to do” with them.

She said this created issues in responses and caused “great frustration to requesters who do not receive a response or receive a request which is delayed because it has got ‘lost’ in the system.” The council receives in the region of 1,500 FOI requests a year, with a number based on similar themes, such as the council’s structure or spending on potholes.

Ms Puzio’s report said the service relied on three agency staff until the end of last year and there was a gap between those staff leaving and permanent staff starting in post from January onwards. She added: “The response rates during January 2025 were particularly poor and have impacted on the overall annual response statistics.

“This situation cannot be allowed to develop again, and close management control of the allocation process is one of the key learning points from this exercise.”