in this section

• Home improvements at the Information Commissioner’s Office
• Home improvement: our objectives
• Setting up in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
• Marketing and communicating: increased understanding, greater professionalism.

Home improvements at the Information Commissioner’s Office
During the year we undertook a comprehensive review of our corporate objectives and operational structure. Our ‘Home Improvement Project’ (HIP) was based on wide staff participation and is intended to determine how we should be organised in order to carry out our increased statutory responsibilities in the most effective way. A number of HIP task forces were formed to consider issues ranging from the establishment of our core values to a review of our approach to enforcement and complaints handling. The work of these task forces is reflected in our Corporate Plan for 2004-2007. Our challenge in the coming year is put in place a revised organisational structure and improved procedures that will best enable us to meet our responsibilities.

Revisions to our corporate governance arrangements also took place during the year. Four non-executive members were appointed to our Management Board. We are already benefiting from the depth of their knowledge and the breadth of their expertise. Other revisions to our corporate governance arrangements include new support arrangements for our senior staff, the re-constitution of the audit committee and improvements to our risk management procedures.

The increasing demands on our office for advice about privacy and access issues have necessitated various improvements in our service delivery. Our Office runs a helpline which offers free advice on any aspect of data protection or freedom of information compliance. Feedback from the many that use our helpline is generally good. We are aware though that some callers were finding it very difficult to get through. Therefore in November we introduced new telephone software which has led to more efficient call distribution. The software enables us to monitor the number of calls we are taking and those that do not get through. This confirmed that we were unable to answer a considerable number of calls. We have tried therefore to ensure that more telephone lines are open. Despite staffing constraints we are now answering a significantly larger number of calls. During the period April to November 2003 the average number of calls answered per month was 5098, with a high of 5902. During the period December 2003 to March 2004 the average number of calls answered per month was 6630 with a high of 7674.

Last year we reported on activities taking place in connection with the modernising government programme. A new ICT infrastructure was rolled out in March 2003. This will support our key business processes and will help us meet targets related to electronic records management and electronic service delivery. A new electronic case handling system with integrated records management has been rolled out to teams handling enquiries, data protection casework and freedom of information publication schemes. New cases are scanned, classified, routed electronically and tracked through the case life-cycle. The benefits of the new application are:

• increased productivity through better casework handling, correspondence tracking and more effective distribution of workload;
• better analysis of our casework, allowing us to target our guidance more effectively;
• more effective use of our resources; and
• the ability to pass work quickly to individuals, teams and, when fully rolled out, to our regional offices.

Setting up in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
The Assistant Commissioners for our regional offices have now been in post for more than a year. Having completed their initial training in our main office, the Assistant Commissioners have now moved to offices in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. The Scottish Regional Office is settled in permanent accommodation in Thistle Street, Edinburgh.

The Welsh and Northern Ireland regional offices are currently in temporary accommodation but the search for permanent accommodation is underway. Staff from Wilmslow and from the Welsh Assembly have been seconded to help establish the regional offices. It is hoped that over the next year recruitment for permanent staff will commence. However, the regional offices have already been very active in carrying out promotional activities in the areas of data protection and freedom of information.

The situation in Scotland is somewhat complicated because freedom of information is a devolved matter, with Scotland having its own Freedom of Information Act and Scottish Information Commissioner. This can be confusing, and we have done a great deal of promotional work to deal with this problem. For example, our Assistant Commissioner explained the data protection – freedom of information interface to an audience of over 500 people at a conference in Edinburgh. The interest in this area was such that the conference had to be repeated in early 2004 to cater for those who had been unable to attend the first event. Robert Turnbull, the Assistant Commissioner for Scotland, has said that ‘the move by the Commissioner to open an office in Scotland has been very warmly welcomed across all sectors especially local government and the Scottish Executive. It shows that the Commissioner has responded positively to the devolution settlement and demonstrates his commitment to providing a local service tailored to local needs.’

Since our Cardiff office opened in November last year, Anne Jones, the Assistant Commissioner for Wales, has been developing contacts and building relationships with local public authorities and other interested parties, mainly through speaking engagements and other meetings. ‘Issues of Welsh language, politics and geography are now starting to add local flavour to the office, with a Welsh language scheme currently in draft form, an audit underway of key guidance for possible translation and plenty of travel to meeting venues accessible to both north and south Walians,’ said Anne. With more staff in place, the coming year should see the Office's profile raised considerably, in terms of awareness workshops, a freedom of information conference and greater publicity about the Office's existence.

Although the Northern Ireland Regional Office deals with both data protection and freedom of information, Marie Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner for Northern Ireland, has discovered that this year her work has mainly focused on promoting freedom of information. According to Marie, ‘public authorities in Northern Ireland are keen to be ready for the January 2005 deadline. There is enormous interest in freedom of information here in Northern Ireland.’ In January of this year a major freedom of information conference was held in the Stormont Hotel in Belfast. Speakers included the Information Commissioner, Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information and Mrs Emily O’Reilly, the Irish Information Commissioner. The conference was an opportunity to launch our Belfast office. It was a great success and brought together 240 delegates from across the public sector in Northern Ireland.

Marketing and communicating: increased understanding, greater professionalism.
This year we have again increased our investment in supporting the public media. We recruited Citigate Communications to provide us with a full press office service and to support us in undertaking more proactive work. Early in the year we also developed a new media relations policy, which sets out our approach to dealing with the media. This was timely given that this year there has been a substantial increase in the volume of media enquiries and coverage of privacy and access to information issues. In particular, interest in the Freedom of Information Act grows as full implementation approaches. Clearly the journalistic community is interested in the increased access to official information that the Act will bring. As reported elsewhere in this Report, events like Soham led to a great deal of negative publicity coming our way. We have since launched a number of proactive media campaigns to challenge the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the legislation. This is part of a wider initiative to demystify the law we are responsible for enforcing.

We have undertaken a range of research projects this year, intended to develop our understanding of the needs of those we serve. These have included the following:

• annual tracking studies conducted to identify key patterns and trends in awareness of rights and obligations amongst the public, record holders and public authorities;
• a segmentation study, conducted to identify how individuals can be grouped and thus targeted with messages relating to their attitudes towards personal information, its use and potential abuse;
• an advertising tracking study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of our national advertising campaign;
• a survey to identify how prepared public authorities are for the introduction of freedom of information access rights; and
• a qualitative study conducted amongst record holders on their attitudes to the legislation, the business benefits it provides and the services we offer to assist them.

We have also introduced a number of monitoring mechanisms to evaluate the performance of the services we offer. These include a website feedback facility, website visitor monitoring statistics and a publications feedback slip. We have also invested in a much improved website. This supports an e-mail alert when new content is posted, is easier for the public to navigate and generally has a more colourful and user-friendly appearance. We expect to make further improvements to the website in the near future.