Reading council has been slammed for transparency delays over requests for information coming from the public.

Freedom of Information requests (FOIs) were established in 2005 as a way of providing information to members of the public, which public bodies are legally required to respond to.

Since then, countless FOIs have been filed to Reading Borough Council.

The requests are meant to be responded to within 20 working days, but it has been found that a third (33.7 per cent) of FOIs to Reading council are replied to outside that timeframe.

The record of delayed FOIs has been blasted by Jason Collie 50, from Caversham, who has formally complained to the council, who’s accused it of failing to improve over the past three years.

Mr Collie said: “They’re not fulfilling their legal obligations.

“The council has had three chances to improve. One of the problems is they don’t view it as a legal requirement, saying it’s too much work to do.

“It is a legal requirement, in the same way residents are required to pay council tax.

“The council have twice promised to fix it and they’ve failed.

“An information commissioner needs to be called in because they can’t do it themselves.”

Recent FOIs have revealed the risk assessments done for the Drag Queen Story Hour events, how much foster carers can get for the day-to-day looking after of children, and the number of people asking for care assessments in Reading.

READ MORE: Police fend off protesters seeking to perform 'citizens arrest' of Drag Queen in Reading 

Mr Collie continued: “It’s not just people being busy bodies, FOIs have revealed that the council was making money out of green waste bin collection charges, and that it was banking money and not doing repairs after the Beer festival in Christchurch Meadows.

“It exposes how they have failed.”

An FOI on green bin charges from 2018 found that the council had generated  £703,311 in the collection charges, £403,311 above the £300,000 predicted scheme running costs.

READ MORE: No council charges more than Reading to get started with garden waste bins

As for Christchurch Meadows, the council admitted it had charged the Reading Campaign for Real Ale £960 for repair works to the meadows which were not enacted after the festival in 2018.

Mr Collie added: “FOI’s are important thing for the residents to have.

“They’ve moaned about too many requests.

“They said they were making improvements, these figures show they’ve gone backwards.

“They need to bring in someone independent who is qualified and able to implement this system if they can’t do it themselves.”

READ MORE: Dispute over 'failure' to clear up after Reading Beer Festival 

Previously, only 50 per cent of FOIs were responded to on time in Q2 of 2020/21, and 66.6 per cent in Q3 of that same year.

The council announced ambitions to respond to 90 per cent of FOIs within 20 days in 2021.

It has conducted internal audits to identify the problem in an effort to speed up response times.

A council spokesperson said: “These latest FOI response time figures are obviously disappointing given that the Council has implemented all of the recommendations which followed an internal review and subsequent Audit and Governance report.

“These included a new case management recording system for FOI’s across the organisation, with associated staff training, one team to co-ordinate all FOI requests across the Council, weekly overdue reports to senior management and quarterly reports across directorates.

“While all of these measures have been implemented successfully in themselves, and there have been some pockets of improvement with some services answering requests at a level of 80% to 90%, the overall response rate across the Council remains unacceptably low.

“The Council considers openness and transparency a key element of Local Government, just one example being the Council choosing to publish an ethnicity pay gap report even though it is not currently required by law.

“We remain determined to do everything we can to drive up FOI response times and are looking again at all aspects of the process to identify what action is be needed in order to improve. Details of an updated action plan will be presented to a meeting of Audit and Governance Committee in September.”