An Apology from Barnet Council for its faulty Freedom of Information system

Regular readers will be aware that there has been a serious issue with the Barnet Council Freedom of Information system (Chaos at the Council - The Freedom of Information system goes haywire ) We are pleased to report that the Council have taken our comments to heart and in what may be a first, apologised to us.

You may be interested to see the apology!
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Dear Mr Tichborne

Following your exchange on Twitter, Stephen asked me to write to you with more information about the FOI disclosure log.

We remain proud of our disclosure log and the integration with the council’s website, which has been in place for a number of years. However, we have recently encountered a problem with the way our website draws information from our case management system in order to create the integration with the website. Our suppliers are investigating and looking at the best way to solve the problem. Unfortunately I am unable to provide you with a fix date as yet because we are still investigating the options.

Whilst the integration is experiencing problems, the search function accessible through the link  “For past FOI Disclosure requests see the disclosure log” on the disclosure log page still works. I appreciate how frustrating this will be to people who have used the integration previously and would like to reassure you that we are working on the problem. I apologise for any inconvenience.

Regards

Victoria Blyth
Information Strategy Manager

Information Management Team
London Borough of Barnet, North London Business Park, Oakleigh Road South, London N11 1NP

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We are pleased that after nearly a decade of trying to pretend that the Barnet Bloggers do not exist, at last we are at least being acknowledged and our concerns taken seriously. We do hope that this is a new leaf being turned and not just a bit of window dressing with the Council Elections coming next year.

We have two questions. Firstly does the council insist on User acceptance testing before public facing systems are set live. The second question is who signed off this system as fit for purpose.