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Can you credit it?

We're afraid we can't!

When we publish something that’s wrong, we are always happy to put it right, and in part that’s what this blog is all about – although we’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions once you’ve read it.
Before our break we criticised Boston Borough Council over a story in the Daily Telegraph about local authority spending on council credit cards. The Telegraph claimed to have asked all local councils for details of their spending over £500 - and Boston was one listed as having a zero spend … but only because it was said to have failed to reply to the newspaper’s e-mail request under the Freedom of Information Act.
“Welcome to the new age of openness and transparency,” we commented – which
put us on the Big Blue Dragon’s naughty step - and a request to publish a “response” trom the council to our piece.
“Checks have revealed that no such inquiry has been received by the council from the Daily Telegraph about this”, we were informed. “Checks also show that, as normally happens in these cases where ‘all local councils’ are asked for details, no Freedom of Information request has been received. However, details of ALL spending over £500 by Boston Borough Council is declared on its website every month.”
In the interest of fair play, we agreed to make matters clear on our return – but it then turned out that things were not quite that simple.
Subsequent enquiries disclosed that the Daily Telegraph did make a request - but sent it to info@boston.gov.uk – an address obtained from a website called whatdotheyknow.com – which we have mentioned before in Boston Eye.
And this is where things started to go pear-shaped.
It seems that the council is pedantic when it comes to its e-mail addresses, and because the Telegraph’s FOI request was not made to foi@boston.gov.uk, it remained “parked" in info@boston - which appears to mean ignored and unanswered.
If all this sounds like much ado about nothing, the point is this …
Info@boston.gov.uk is the e-mail address published for use by the punters – the likes of you and us - as a way to get in touch with the council.
On the evidence above it would appear if any hapless voter with a question for the council fails to address it specifically to the correct e-mail address, it will simply be “parked” i.e. ignored.
Surely, it is not beyond the wit of whomever checks this e-mail box (if anyone bothers, of course) to direct any questions to the appropriate department – in the case of the Telegraph’s request it would not exactly have been rocket science.
We wonder how many times members of the public have written to the council on any one of dozens of possible issues and waited for a reply that never came – just because someone couldn’t be bothered!
We are told that in the case we’ve been writing about, the information the Telegraph asked for was available without the need for an FOI request as the council publishes all expenditure over £500 on its website every month.
Up to a point, as Lord Copper’s endlessly patient foreign editor would say …
To see what the Telegraph could have learned from a perusal of the numbers, we visited the list of spending over £500 and selected one or two months at random. We searched for “credit,” “card,” and “credit card” without success. Does this mean, Boston has no credit card, no credit card spending - or simply files it under a reference that is simply very hard to find?
Perhaps like the word “info,” the words “credit cards” take on a whole new meaning in Boston!
Just one final point.
We also noted on the lists of expenditure the arrival of the figures for the month of May – but when we took a closer look, we found that they were the figures for March – duplicated and reproduced two months later.

May? Maybe not - the figures are for March

And guess what? The person who deals with it is on holiday.

You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com  Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.