Leicester Mercury political correspondent
“I know nothing”
No records exist anywhere on county council hard drives, or council premises, of an FOI request I lodged just a few weeks ago.
This means that the request was either dealt with entirely verbally – rare for an FOI request in my experience – or that all emails have already been deleted, hard drives thoroughly wiped, and documents shredded. Now, I want to know why.
My request regarded PR at the county council. To quickly recap Westco, the commercial arm of a London council, got paid to find a new PR boss for Leicestershire County Council. The ad attracted 40 applicants, no-one ever got interviewed, and the firm got another six month £60,000 stint at the authority.
The first interim PR guru supplied to the council by Westco, Fergus Sheppard, was replaced for the second six month stint by Paul Masterman, but still worked for the county council, one day each week, until fairly recently. He was not based at County Hall, and was instead down in London. Private Eye later alleged that he was effectively council leader David Parsons’ personal PR man, but the council denied it.
Now, this summer I attempted to use Freedom of Information laws to examine emails between Fergus and David to establish the exact nature of Fergus’ role.
But effectively I was told there wasn’t any communication between the council leader and one of the authority’s most senior PR chiefs, or that there were no records at all and all emails had been deleted from council servers.
I was surprised at this, so I lodged a new Freedom of 
Information request last month, asking for all correspondence relating to the original request. I hoped that it would shed more light on how my original request was dealt with internally.
The response has now arrived. The council says it doesn’t hold the information. Again.
I’ve now asked for an internal review, to establish who was contacted as part of this request, what their responses were, and how any paperwork or email records may have been disposed of.
If I don’t get any satisfaction the next step will be to report the matter to the information commissioner. Due to a backlog, an investigation by the commissioner is likely to report back just before the county council elections in May 2013.
I’m not stopping until I’ve got to the bottom of this one, David.
