A council leader who emailed a Freedom of Information officer saying “This is not going out, who prepared the response?” has been cleared of tampering with FOI responses.

Kirklees Council Leader Mehboob Khan faced a tribunal which looked at 16 requests that he was involved in.

The tribunal found: “the respondent did not cross that line. But, in the tribunal’s view he did step on it.”

The Huddersfield Examiner report:

A TRIBUNAL has found that Kirklees Council leader Clr Mehboob Khan did not interfere with the public’s right to access information under the Freedom of Information Act.

But it remains unclear as to why proposed FOI responses were put to him before they were sent back to the person who had posed the question.

Kirklees Council accepts that at the time there was a lack of clarity as to who should be ultimately responsible for sending back FOI responses.

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Matthew Burgess
http://www.mattburgess.co
I am a journalist and author. I am a journalist at the UK edition of WIRED magazine. In 2015, my first book Freedom of Information: A Practical Guide for UK Journalists, was published. My second book Reed Hastings: Building Netflix, was published in March 2020. I created FOI Directory in 2012 and have maintained it in my spare time ever since.