We’ve submitted half a dozen FOI requests to Westminster City Council. Here are their responses.
For any of you who don’t know, “Freedom of Information” (FOI) requests are requests you can send councils in the United Kingdom.
The councils are legally obliged to respond.
They are supposed to take 30 days or less.
Topic: Redacted Complaints from 2017-2019
Date Responded: 28th January 2020
Question asked: Provide redacted complaints data about buskers since 2017.
Council Response: Provided 3,990 complaints between 15th December 2017 and 17th December 2019
Why this is important:
1. It showed the council can redact 3,990 complaints with no problem
2. It showed that at least 5% of the complaints were outside of the borough, or not about buskers, or accidental repeats. In other words, there was no vetting at all.
Topic: Covent Garden complaints in first year of licence
Reference number: 25236101
Date Submitted: 16th March 2022
Date Responded: 12th April 2022
Days taken to respond: 27
Question asked: Provide all complaints data about the ‘West Piazza’ pitch in Covent Garden, in the first year of the licence’s operation.
Council Response: They don’t know how many complaints there were about the West Piazza pitch. However, the region of Covent Garden got 77 complaints between April 1st 2021 and March 31st 2022.
Why this is important:
1. The council doesn’t know which complaints are about pitches governed by the Covent Garden Street Performer Association.
2. There were only 77 complaints per year in Covent Garden during this time. Pre-licence that number was 141 complaints per year. That’s a 45% decrease.
3. That decrease came about despite the fact that none of the Covent Garden buskers signed up for a licence.
4. At the same time, there was a general increase in the number of non-busking noise complaints. The CGSPA was outperforming.
5. It’s likely that the West Piazza received just 2 or 3 complaints total over that whole year.
Topic: how much it cost to fail to prosecute a busker
Reference number: 28588549
Date Submitted: 24th October 2022
Date Responded: 10th November 2022
Days taken to respond: 17
Question asked: How much money did WCC spend on their failed attempt to prosecute Ben Dixon for unlicensed busking.
Council Response: Legal costs were £1,246.
Why this is important:
It’s not much money, but it also doesn’t include the actual amount of money it cost: the staff time, enforcement time, the time it took from council officials in meetings etc.
Topic: How much the licence cost to implement in first 2 years.
Reference number: 33154272
Date Submitted: 18th September 2023
Date Responded: 21st November 2023
Days taken to respond: 64
Question asked: Set up costs for the licence were estimated to be £73,500, plus an annual operation cost of £43,985. How much did the council actually spend?
Also, your 2023 report said each application takes £200 to process, not including “the costs associated with monitoring compliance associated with these licences”. Please provide costs, broken down into a) Processing busking licence applications, b) Monitoring compliance, and c) any other categories with a significant cost.
Council Response:
1. They didn’t keep track of set up costs, so can’t answer that.
2. It should have said “£100”, not “£200”. That was their mistake.
3. As such, the 400 applications they get per year cost about £40,000 to process.
4. They don’t keep track of enforcement costs, so can’t answer that either.
Why this is important: The council simply has no idea how much this scheme is costing them.
However, they estimated the entire running costs of the licensing regime would be £43k, and yet they’re spending £40k just on processing applications.
Is that because they thought it would take less than 1 hour to process an application? Or because they had no idea how many buskers would be in the program?
Topic: non-busking noise complaints
Reference number: 33154273
Date Submitted: 18th September 2023
Date Responded: 21st November 2023
Days taken to respond: 64
Question asked: Provide overall noise complaints received each year in Westminster, for each calendar year,
from 2017 to 2023.
Council Response: Here you go.
Why this is important:
Showed that there was a spike and drop in general noise complaints at exactly the same time as the spike/drop in noise complaints about buskers.
In other words, it proved that focusing solely on busker noise complaints stripped out the context: covid.
Topic: Redacted complaints data
Reference number: 33154270
Date Submitted: 18th September 2023
Date Responded: 4th January 2024
Days taken to respond: 108
Question asked: Provide redacted complaints data for first two years of licence operation.
Also, the council claimed “Just over 50% of complaints (2576) were related to noise, with around 10% relating to unlicensed entertainers or street trading.” Please include your working: show how those complaints were classified (unlicensed buskers, street traders) in order to arrive at those figures.
Council Response: It would take too long to respond to this. The council doesn’t have an easy way to extract this information.
So, it would take 10 minutes per complaint, and the council had 2,418 complaints over this period.
Why this is important: Their response is almost definitely a lie.
1. They DO have the ability to export complaints data. They’ve done it in the past. They’ve also redacted the complaints data in the past.
2. Last time, they sent us 3,990 redacted complaints. This time they’re saying it would take too long to redact 2,418 complaints.
3. They say each complaint would take 10 minutes to redact. To do all 2,418 complaints it would take 403 hours.
I would pay £20 to watch a council official demonstrating that removing names and door numbers from a single cell in a spreadsheet takes 10 whole minutes. Imagine how slowly their mouse would have to move!
Topic: Frequency of individual Complainants
Reference number: 33154271
Date Submitted: 18th September 2023
Date Responded: 29th February 2024
Days taken to respond: 164
Question asked: The 2023 report states there were high numbers of repeat complainants. Please provide the number of repeat complainants per year, and how many times each complainant complained, if known. In other words, something like, “Location A complained 200 times, Location B complained 190 times, and so on.” Obviously you can redact identifying information.
Council Response: No, this would take 90 hours
Why this is important: They’re simply refusing to show their work. They’ve made claims in their reports, and are refusing to back those claims up.
Topic: Explanation for not providing Redacted Complaints
Reference number: 35578221
Date Submitted: 22nd April 2024
Date Responded: 21st May 2024
Days taken to respond: 29
Question asked: In response to FOI #13034378 (mentioned above), the council claimed it could not provide complaints data because it would take too long.
So, I asked them to provide:
a) an explanation why it would take more time to provide 2418 complaints in 2023 than it did to provide 3990 complaints in 2019
b) AND any record the council has about how much time it took to respond to FOI request #13034378
Council Response: No. We have already said “it will take too long”, and this question is “substantially similar” to my previous request
Why this is important: This isn’t true. I asked for an explanation, which they have refused to give. This suggests that (as noted above) they ARE lying that it would take too long to provide this data.
Topic: So…what are the real numbers?
Reference number: 35577922
Date Submitted: 22nd April 2024
Date Responded: NOT YET!
Days taken to respond: 56 days and counting
Question asked: In reports, the council has said they received 5,070 complaints. In response to an FOI request, they said that number was only 2,418.
So, I asked them to account for the discrepancy between those two numbers and, if the smaller figure is correct, to provide updated data for complaints-received-per-month.
Council Response: None yet, after two months
Why this is important: We want to know how badly the council got its own numbers wrong.