FOIs - FOI Response Register

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act to request the following information from the Health Board:

1. The total number of Freedom of Information requests that have been received by the Health Board.

See answer and table in Q3 below

2. The total number of Freedom of Information requests which have received a response within the statutory deadline of 20 working days (i.e. considered to be answered/completed/resolved). I would like this expressed as a total figure and as a percentage of all Freedom of Information requests received.

See answer and table in Q3 below

3. The total number of Freedom of Information requests which have been appealed by the individual/organisation who submitted the original request for any reason. I would like this expressed as a total figure and as a percentage of all Freedom of Information requests received.

I request this information expressed as an annual figure for each year between 2016 and 2022 (inclusive).

With regards to data from 2016-Sep 2022 then in accordance with FOISA s 16(1), NHS Shetland confirms that it holds the information requested but that it is exempt from disclosure under FOISA s 25(1) as the information requested is accessible without submitting a request under FOISA s 1(1). The information you have requested is available here:

https://www.itspublicknowledge.info/statistics

I also request the data as a monthly figure for January, February and March 2023.

Notes:

• In the table above, we have interpreted ‘appealed’ to mean subject to a review under FOISA s 20(1) rather than an appeal to the Scottish Information Commissioner under FOISA s 47. If your question does relate to FOISA s 47 appeals then the total is 0 for the period covered by your question.
• Calculating percentages by dividing by the number of requests received in any given month does not necessarily produce meaningful results. Requests received in one month are very often due in the next month and so these requests will be counted in the ‘on time’ figures for the following month. The ‘on time’ total is not a subset of the ‘received’ total and this results in misleading percentages.

A more meaningful approach is to look at activity within a given time period and to look at due/deadline date of the requests.

The table below shows how many requests were due in each month and, of these, how many were responded to / resolved on time. This way, the ‘on time’ total is always a subset of the ‘due’ total and so gives a better indication of performance.

Please note that some requests that were due in one month will have been completed earlier than the deadline and in the previous month – this means the ‘on time’ totals will differ from those in the table above.