22nd July 2011, 02:50 PM
I certainly see no reason not to challenge. Their response is standard bureaucratic stonewalling and obfuscation.
With regards to your response, there is a minor typo on the 4th paragraph: "a" should be "as" I believe.
With regard to the refusal to publish correspondence, their argument seems to be that councillor's private emails are not subject to FOI, and as such they have no correspondence to show you. The policy was presumably discussed at a number of meetings, assuming for now your scenarios of capricious dictatorship by Councillor Melton are actually wrong, and the minutes of those meetings should be obtainable under FOI. I seriously doubt the information you're hoping to find will be in them, minutes being notoriously easy to manipulate, and I'm sure we've all attended meetings where someone has given one explanation "for the minutes" and another off the record.
Got to be worth poking them anyway, just to see what happens.
With regards to your response, there is a minor typo on the 4th paragraph: "a" should be "as" I believe.
With regard to the refusal to publish correspondence, their argument seems to be that councillor's private emails are not subject to FOI, and as such they have no correspondence to show you. The policy was presumably discussed at a number of meetings, assuming for now your scenarios of capricious dictatorship by Councillor Melton are actually wrong, and the minutes of those meetings should be obtainable under FOI. I seriously doubt the information you're hoping to find will be in them, minutes being notoriously easy to manipulate, and I'm sure we've all attended meetings where someone has given one explanation "for the minutes" and another off the record.
Got to be worth poking them anyway, just to see what happens.