A sample of roughly a quarter (70) of all principal local authorities in England was selected, consisting of 7 county councils, 9 metropolitan boroughs, 14 unitary authorities, 8 London boroughs and 32 district councils (a slightly smaller proportion of these were selected given the large number of such councils). They were sent an FOI request consisting of 12 questions:

Dear FOI officer

I am conducting research into administration of FOI requests and I would be grateful if you could provide the following information.

Part 1: The following questions aim to establish how requests are logged and monitored.

1. What system(s) do you use to log and monitor FOI requests? e.g. spreadsheet, Access database, specialist software (please identify the brand/supplier if so)

2. What criteria do you use to decide whether correspondence should be logged as an FOI request or (for example) handled as ‘business as usual’?

3. Are requesters’ names routinely removed from requests before they are circulated more widely within the authority?

Part 2: The following questions aim to establish what resources your authority allocates to the support of FOI centrally, and whether requests are answered by a central team or devolved to departments across the authority.

4. Do you have an individual member of staff and/or team with lead responsibility for FOI (e.g. FOI Officer or Information Governance team)?

5. If so, how many FTE staff are there in this team?

6. What other responsibilities do staff in this team have? (e.g. data protection, records management, etc)

7. Are responses to FOI requests normally drafted by the central FOI officer/team, or are they drafted by staff in the department with lead responsibility for the subject matter of the request?

8. Who approves responses before they are sent out?

Part 3: The following questions are designed to establish the timeliness of responses and how this is monitored within the authority.

9. How many FOI requests did your authority receive in 2016? Please include requests under the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) within this figure if you log these separately.

10. How many of those FOI & EIR requests received in 2016 did your authority answer within 20 working days?