Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office: Freedom of Information

(asked on 1st September 2023) - View Source

Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps their Department is taking to improve the response time to FOI requests.


Answered by
David Rutley Portrait
David Rutley
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 7th September 2023

The FCDO takes its responsibilities under the Freedom of Information Act very seriously and will continue to strive to answer Freedom of Information (FOI) requests within the required timescales.

We have taken a number of steps aimed at improving response times. To date, the FCDO has:

· Undertaken a series of recruitment exercises to fill vacancies within the team.

· Dedicated resources to additional surge capacity slots to help speed up processing times.

· Created a dedicated Subject Access Request team.

We have undertaken a two stage review:

· Stage 1: (June 2023) The bringing together of Knowledge and Information Management Services with the Information Rights Unit to align all information related responsibilities in one place.

· Stage 2: (October 2023) To review our FOI process in the FCDO.

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