You now have a right to ask for information held by your council, under a law called The Freedom of Information Act 2000. Sometimes this is called FOI.
From 1 January 2005 you have a right to get hold of information held by any public body, including South Northamptonshire Council.
Anyone can. It does not matter how old you are, where you live or your nationality.
Any information held by the Council can be given to you. There is a limited amount of information that may be confidential and we cannot let you have. The law calls these “exemptions”. We will tell you if that is the case.
We have a Publication Scheme that lists all the kinds of information we have. You can look at this by clicking on The Freedom of Information Act - Publication Scheme (pdf).
The law says you have to let us have your FOI request in writing, but that includes an email. There are a number of ways you can let us have your request:
You can email our Customer Contact Centre or you can write to us at:
Information Systems Officer
South Northamptonshire Council
Springfields
Towcester
Northants NN12 6AE
To make it easier for us to deal with your request please include:
Please make the request as specific as you can, we cannot always help you with very general requests. We may have to come back to you to check what you want in more detail.
It is our job to help you make the request and to get the information you want, so please ask for help if you need it.
We must come back to you as quickly as possible and no later than 20 working days after you made your FOI request. We will let you know if we hold the information and give you the information you want. If we can’t give you the information – for example, it may be “exempt” – then we will tell you why.
If you have a complaint about how we handled your request, please let us know by clicking on Complaints.
If you are still not happy, you can complain to the Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner's details can be found at this link to the Information Commissioner's website.
We may charge you if we have to convert the information into a different format. We may also charge for any photocopying and postage costs.
Contact us at our Customer Contact Centre on 0845 2300226 or you can find out more about FOI at the Information Commissioner's website.