Alan Dransfield's Blog

Email sent – Sun 29/01/2017 07:03

Ben Bradshaw MP for Exeter.

Dear Sir

According to the ICO published records for their Decision Notices
(DN) the ICO has completed only 34 DN this month and 35 for last month.

I do not accept such totals warrant the huge staffing Levels
at the ICO.

Moreover and more importantly, their total DN numbers have
had huge discrepancies for the last two weeks.

I call upon my MP to write to the Minister of Culture and
Sport and the Lord Chief Justice protesting on my behalf about the
ICO workload. The average total of Decision Notices for last year was 100 per
month. What is also very alarming is the ICO has no idea how much each individual case costs the public purse.

I believe every FOIA case which
passes through the ICO should be given a cost centre control ref number and
then the ICO would be able to identify total costs of individual cases.

I am also alarmed to learn the
ICO does not operate either ISO 9000 series QA/QC or ISO 1400
Environmental. It would appear the ICO is allocated a lump sum each year
say £15 million pounds to run their organization and there is no fiscal accountability
or ring-fence. The ICO has no QA/QC controls and for the last decade the
ICO officials have been able to claim expenses without receipts. They are
also still non- compliant to the Register of Interest laws.

I am of the opinion the ICO is in need of a good shakedown to improve quality of service
for the general public.

With thanks

Yours sincerely

Alan M Dransfield

Email sent – 29/01/2017 05:37

Information Commissioner’s Office

Dear Mr Bailey and Mr Arnold

There is another major discrepancy with your total figures for the ICO Decision Notices. Today’s total is 7614 and
yesterday’s total was 9670. There can be only three explanations for these false figures

1. Gremlins in your IT System.

2. Incompetence of the person(s) inputting this data.

3. ICO massaging their Decision
Notice figures to assist fraud.

I would suggest the latter.

It is nearly two weeks since I alerted you two gentlemen to
this anomaly. What have you done about it?

It should be noted also that you have not published one single Decision Notice since 12th Jan 2017.

For your information, action and
files

Yours sincerely

Alan M Dransfield

https://search.ico.org.uk/ico/search/decisionnotice