6.1 Exceptions to five-year retention period – LGSCO Alerts

LGSCO Alerts should be reviewed by Director of Intake and Assessment/AOs on a regular basis, and removed if they are no longer required – see Managing challenging complainant behaviour. If an LGSCO Alert is still attached to a case when it is due to be anonymised after five years, it should be reviewed to decide whether:

• the LGSCO Alert can be deleted (violent warning markers must be deleted when the person is no longer a threat), or
• the marker should be retained on the ECHO record.

An LGSCO Alert can be retained after a case has been anonymised as the alert itself will retain the complainant’s name. But this should only happen in exceptional cases.

If an LGSCO Alert is still recorded when the case is due for deletion after 10 years, the Director of Investigation must endorse any decision to retain the warning marker and all subsequent annual reviews.

6.2 FOI/DPA/EIR requests

Where there is a request for information about material held on a complaint file, the request must be put on the relevant ECHO record and the ‘Other contact’ screen must be updated accordingly. A record must be kept of what is provided.

Requests for information are not ‘substantive actions’ that would start the 12-month retention period running again. However, any files with FOIA/DPA/EIR correspondence on them must be kept for at least four months after the last date of that correspondence, or longer if we have been notified an appeal has been made to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). In such cases the material must be retained until the ICO’s – and any higher authority’s – processes are completed. If the complainant tells us they have appealed to the ICO but the ICO has not notified us within a reasonable time, we should check an appeal has actually been lodged. If it has not, then our retention period will still apply. The appropriate action should be recorded in the ‘Other contact’ screen to ensure the correct retention period is observed. Cases with no outcome date on the ‘other contact’ screen will be protected from deletion. Cases with an outcome date on the ‘other contact’ screen will have the file deletion date extended.

An appellant in an FOI/EIR case can appeal to the First Tier Tribunal after a decision has been made by the ICO, and possibly to the Upper Tier Tribunal after that. Data subjects cannot appeal subject access request decisions to the First Tier Tribunal, but in all cases (FOI/EIR/DPA) a decision may be appealed to a higher court (Court of Appeal). See Appendix 1 for checklist of timescales.

Where there has been a refusal to disclose (upheld, following an appeal if relevant), a note of the reasons for refusal should be kept on file, including the application of the public interest test, where applicable. If there is a complaint, the ICO may want to see all of the case-handling papers, including the information that was denied, hence the need to retain this material for a reasonable period (four months) after the decision to deny the request.

For more details on recording requests for information, see the Policy on access to information.

Training material

Casework material is not retained solely for the purposes of training. Where case material is required for training purposes, only published material or hypothetical cases should be used.