Watchdog turns up heat on fire chiefs

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Fire Service chiefs were wrongly advised in a management memo that only official information requests marked urgent needed the code-red treatment.

A restricted newsletter from the service's human resources department said they were under no general obligation to respond to requests inside 20 working days - advice that has Chief Ombudsman Sir Brian Elwood spitting flames.

"Unless specific reasons are provided to support a request for urgency, you are under no obligation to respond before the 20 working days are up," said the newsletter, from human resources manager Vince Arbuckle.

But Sir Brian, indicating he was keeping a close eye on the service, said that interpretation of the Official Information Act was simply incorrect.

"The obligation under the act is to respond as soon as practicable but in any event not later than 20 working days - that is the key to it."

He was also unimpressed with a listing of what the memo said were good reasons for wanting to withhold information - including privacy and the protection of individuals from harassment.

Sir Brian said there should have been countervailing advice that such reasons must be balanced against public-interest considerations, which - in certain circumstances - could outweigh a need for secrecy.

Mr Arbuckle initially stood by the advice as legally correct but, when told that was not how the Chief Ombudsman saw it, offered to publish a clarification in his next newsletter.

"Fire Service policy is quite clear that we do everything possible to comply with the act and we handle and go through any requests as soon as possible," he said.

There had been no sinister intent behind the advice in the newsletter, which was written by one of his staff for the confidential attention of senior managers. However, he acknowledged "it could have been expressed a bit better."

Sir Brian and Ombudsman Anand Satyanand singled out the Fire Service in their annual report to Parliament last year for generating a large volume of complaints about tardy responses to requests for official information.

The firefighters' union has accused Mr Arbuckle's department of routinely waiting 20 days before refusing its requests for information.

But service acting chief executive Alison Timms said a backlog of information requests had been cleared after extra resources were put to the task, and every effort was made to respond within the legal time limit.