FOI release

Casework by councillors

Some or all of the information requested was not provided because we determined that the cost to do so would exceed the appropriate limit.

Case reference FOI2026/00586

Received 6 March 2026

Published 16 March 2026

Request

Please advise the number of pieces of "casework" raised by each councillor with your local authority from 1/3/25 to 1/3/26 - as a list with the number of queries each councillor has logged. Please include all queries officially logged by each named councillor - whether on behalf of a resident they represent or where the councillor has raised the query on his own account. (Often these are known as "member enquiries").

Response

Please advise the number of pieces of "casework" raised by each councillor with your local authority from 1/3/25 to 1/3/26  - as a list with the number of queries each councillor has logged. Please include all queries officially logged by each named councillor - whether on behalf of a resident they represent or where the councillor has raised the query on his own account.

(Often these are known as "member enquiries").

 

A: This information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Herefordshire Council does not hold a central record of all member enquiries. Councillors are able to contact individual teams directly and may do so by email, telephone or other informal means. As a result, member enquiries are recorded in a variety of ways depending on the service area involved and there is no single corporate system in which all member enquiries are recorded.

To identify and extract the information requested, the Council would be required to contact each individual service area and ask them to manually search their email correspondence and records for the period in question, for all 53 councillors, and then compile the results.

 

This would at a conservative estimate take far more than the 18 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.

Under our duty to provide advice and assistance, you may wish to consider refining your request. For example, you could limit your request to a single service area, or limit it to a specific councillor.

A narrower request may fall within the cost limit, and we would be happy to check this for you.

Documents

There are no documents for this release.

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