Action Renewables is a joint venture between the DETI and Viridian to stimulate awareness and discussion of renewable energy technologies.
In 2004 they had an excellent plan to help raise awareness – power the lights of the Belfast City Hall Christmas tree using a wind-powered generator.
Everyone seems to have thought this was a good idea: the Council gets to show its committment to promoting renewable engergy, Action Renewables gets some excellent PR, and the public gets to see that renewable energy in action.
Unfortunately it seems that, much to the surprise of everyone else involved, Planning Services decided that, as the City Hall is a Listed Building, planning permission would be required for the temporary generator. And so, although the Council agreed in principle to the idea, it had to be shelved for a year to allow everyone to properly work through the details of the proposal.
However, I couldn’t find any record of this actually being brought back before the Council again this year, and so made a request to find out what had happened. The Council have confirmed that this wasn’t actually brought back before them this year, and have suggested contacting Action Renewables’ PR firm to find out what happened.
My suspicion is that this was simply forgotten about, so it’ll be interesting to see how they respond…
I’ve just been informed by Food Safety in Belfast City Council that they have plans to publish their inspection reports on the web, but are currently awaiting legal opinion to make sure it’s OK for them to volunteer this information openly (rather than as a result to a specific FoI request).
Assuming they get the go ahead they hope to have a site live in the first half of 2006 which can then be used as a pilot site so that all councils across the UK can present the information in a consistent manner.
Whilst I await the detailed response to my request, I should probably make a similar one from several of the other local councils, as lots of the restaurants I eat at semi-regularly are outside Belfast…
When I’ve visited Boston in the past I’ve always liked that the local press publish accounts of food safety inspections, and have often wondered why we don’t get that here.
I suspect that that’s about to change. The Information Commissioner has ruled that local councils have to make public their reports on the health and safety of restaurants they inspect.
No doubt it will take Belfast City Council quite some time to get around to implementing a system for doing this, so to kick things off I’ve made an FoI request for details of all inspections in the last two years.
It seems that Belfast City Council agree that their website is terrible.
They’re worried that traffic to their website has declined (although I suspect they don’t really measure this very well), and also that the recent report by the Society of Information Technology Managers on the website of all UK local authorities gives them bad marks compared to the other major cities in the UK (and even some of the other councils in NI).
So, they’re going to do something about it.
They’re not going to fix any of the technology though. They’re just going to hire a team of 3 Web Editors for a 12 month period to write better content for the site.
Somehow I doubt that this will help much …
The DSD have finally provided me with the information I requested back in October (although they seem to have internally classed the request date as 9 November!) relating to the awarding of the department’s advertising account (including design and placement of advertising, event management, PR, marketing, and general communications support) to Navigator Blue back in 2002.
Although they have provided much of the information relating to this, they have withheld the original tender documents and the costing and pricing information – again citing Section 41 – Information Provided in Confidence.
They say that they have consulted Navigator Blue, who do not consent to the information being released. There is no comment to say whether they likewise checked with Anderson Spratt, AV Browne, or GCAS, (who were also shortlisted), or any of other firms who may have replied to the tender but were not shortlisted.
All of the notes from the various pitches made by these firms have been provided, as well as emails discussing why some of them were unsuccessful, but names of the companies have been redacted from each. (So I can’t tell yet which of them was listed as seeming “a bit naive” on PR!)
My appeal will presumably be almost identical to the one made to DETI.
Incidentally, this was the definitely the best presentation of material in response to an FoI request from one of these departments! Although they didn’t supply any of the information electronically, they separated the material into 24 sections of documents, each of which was in a clear plastic folder, all neatly bound together. Most of the other departments just dumped a pile of several hundred documents in an envelope and posted them!
