Agenda item

Attendees;

-           Rhys Cornwall – Head of People and Business Change

-           Mark Bleazard – Information Development Manager

-           Tariq Slaoui – Information Manager

The Head of People and Business Change introduced the report and explained that this was not a statutory report but something the Council did as best practice. Each year the Council produce this report as act of transparency and openness. There will always be a risk associated with information but we are trying to mitigate those risks by creating and implementing processes, procedures and training staff. The report covered a number of areas including the introduction of GDPR, Freedom of Information requests and covered up until 31^st March 2019.

The Committee asked the following questions;

-           If there was a data breach where one of the other SRS partners were affected, would our information be at risk? The Head of Service informed the Committee that all of Newport’s data is segregated from other organisations, without exception. The data belongs to the organisation and SRS just host it on their servers. With Office 365 you might see Monmouth email addresses in the address book but this does mean they can access our information.

-           One of the members explained to the Committee that they are using their work issued mobile for emails, but the new app does not require a password to access and queried whether this was a risk? The Officers explained that some of the new facilities were not as secure as they could have been and they were working on some issues and bugs with the new hardware and software. They thanked the Member for bringing to their attention and asked to speak with him later to see what they could do to increase the security on his phone. The Head of Service explained that financially moving to Office 365 was the cheaper option for the Council at the time, which meant that they made the transition sooner than they would have liked.

-           The Committee drew the Officers attention to the significant increase in Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, and the reasons for this. The Officers stated that they did not know why there had been an increase in FOI requests, but it might be due to people becoming more aware of the process. There are ten or twelve data sets available online to the public and the Council were looking at ways of introducing more. There was a self-interest in decreasing the number of FOIs due to the ever increasing impact it had on staff resources. The FOI requests covered everything from Brexit and Grenfell. The Committee asked if themes were identified and added to the FOI transparency page and Officers stated that this was something that could be looked at in the future. The Officer explained that one problem they faced with FOI was a citizen could ask as many questions as they wished, sometimes which required multiple officers from across the organisation to answer, which impacted on our ability to respond within the time limit of twenty working days.

-           The Officers explained that the personal notebook that contained Newport City Council data was taken when an employee left. This was a data breach because regardless of who owned the notebook, Newport City Council owned the data contained in it. The Officers reassured the Councillors that the exit process for employees had been changed to reflect this newly identified risk.

-           The Committee requested more information on the process of staff claiming expenses. The Head of Service informed the Committee that all HR claims were made through the online HR system, they had seen a decrease of sixty thousand pounds since switching from paper based.

-           The Officer informed the Committee that they were planning to apply for the Cyber Essential Plus accreditation in July 2019, in line with Cyber Essential Plus funding from Welsh Government.

Conclusions

The Committee made the following comments and recommendations to the Cabinet Member;

-           The Committee recommended that the Freedom of Information requests and responses are documented on the internet, the Committee also felt that they should be categorised and organised by theme.

-           The Committee recommended that the transparency webpage should be expanded to allow the citizens of Newport access to more information.