Dear Information Governance Team,

Please treat this as a further formal complaint about the handling of FOI request 9715501.

It is now 8 April 2026. My original request was submitted on 8 February 2026. The statutory deadline expired on 6 March 2026. More than a month has now passed since that deadline, and I still have no substantive response of any kind.

That is unacceptable.

Your email of 23 March 2026 stated that an internal review would only be carried out once the original request had been answered. That response did not address the actual issue I raised, namely your failure to comply with section 10 FOIA and your continued failure to issue any substantive response at all.

You cannot evade scrutiny of delay simply by insisting that a request must first be answered before its handling can be reviewed. The complaint I raised was precisely about the fact that no response had been issued within the statutory timeframe. That is a handling issue in its own right.

This request was sent as part of a bulk batch to six local authorities. Every other authority in the batch has already provided a substantive response. In several cases, an internal review of that substantive response has also already taken place. Durham County Council is the only authority still stuck at the stage of not having produced any substantive FOI response at all.

That reflects extremely poorly on the Council’s FOI handling.

This is not an unusually difficult request. It concerns retention schedules, disposal procedures, and related information governance material for education records. These are the sort of documents that a public authority ought to be able to identify and disclose, or refuse properly, without this level of drift and dysfunction.

Please now do the following without further delay:

1. Provide the full substantive response to FOI request 9715501.
2. Confirm why the request was allowed to drift so far beyond the statutory deadline.
3. Confirm whether my internal review request of 19 March 2026 has been logged as a complaint about handling delay, even if you refuse to call it a review at this stage.
4. Confirm what action has actually been taken since your email of 18 March 2026, beyond “chasing” the service area.

If I do not receive a substantive response immediately, I will refer the matter to the Information Commissioner and include the Council’s refusal to engage properly with the handling complaint as part of that referral.

Yours faithfully,

Jamie Halliday