Wednesday 11 November 2009

Royal Sands development Ramsgate and the freedom of information act.

Due to my continued exasperation, mostly with getting the council and the developer to tell us in Ramsgate what exactly is going on, I put in some freedom of information requests and an official complaint a while ago.

Now it may come as a bit of a surprise to some people but this is the first time I have made freedom of information act requests, as all of the senior council officers involved will be earning over a thousand pounds a week I don’t like to waste their time.

What really sparked it of was this email exchange.

Date: 08/09/2009

To:
******@thanet.gov.uk

**** is it possible to have a copy of the Pleasurama development agreement obviously with anything showing financial details redacted? I am most interested to know if the safety issues were addressed in it.

Best regards Michael


Subject: Pleasurama Development
Date: 23/09/2009 13:05:33 GMT Daylight Time
From:
******@thanet.gov.uk

To:
MichaelChild@aol.com

Dear Mr ChildCustomer Feedback Reference Number:6136/0Thank you for your message.The documents are several hundred pages long and it would take me months to delete figures etc.. So I see no point in going to the expense of copying the agreement, which doesn't contain clauses on shoreline management (coast protection) anyway.Remember that the planning application, and decision is the key document.




With the formal response from the Environment Agency covering the subject of interest to you.




We know subsequently that (EA officer) **** produced a note from the EnvironmentAgency on what it would wish to see if the application was made 'now'. But that does not form part of the planning consent.Yours sincerely******


They are now all coming to the date by which the council has to deal with them and I am starting to receive emails from various council officers, not exactly answers to my questions, which seemed to me to be pretty straightforward.

Anyway here is the link to the little website I have written for this http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/foi/ I have removed peoples names as this is only really about what to expect if you make a complaint or ask for a document under the freedom of information act.

2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry 22.22 you can’t make personal comments here, individual officers no matter what you feel about the can’t defend themselves in this forum.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.