Back on 23rd February VB published an article about a letter from four care organisations that had been sent to Isle of Wight council (IWC) Chief Executive, Steve Beynon, accusing the council of improperly diverting £1.9 million Government-funding away from the Supporting People programme.
At the time of publishing the article, we also wrote to the IWC press office requesting comment from Steve Beynon in response to this serious allegation.
By way of guidance, the normal response time from the IWC press office is a matter of hours.
After not hearing back, we wrote again on 2 March.
Still nothing, so we wrote again on 4th March.
Couple of weeks later and still no response, so we wrote again on 19th March.
Alas no response this week, so yes, you guessed it, we wrote again, this time on 24th March.
That makes a grand total of five requests and nearly five weeks before we’ve finally been told that our request is being dealt with and we’d get a response shortly. Nothing has arrived as yet.
Why so long for a response?
To put this in context – this is more time than the law dictates a Freedom of Information request should take.
Why would it take so long to receive a response to such a serious accusation, as the letter sent to Steve Beynon by Nichola Goom (ROCC), Naomi Somerville (Supporting People Provider Forum), Vic Rayner (Sitra) and Simon Nunn (South National Housing Federation) clearly was?
Image: Kristian D. under CC BY 2.0
