The council is too slow to respond to too many freedom of information (FoI) requests, according to opposition leader Steve Davis, who also said that staff felt nervous and under pressure to withhold information.
Official figures showed that replies are late in more than a quarter of cases, the Green councillor told a Brighton and Hove City Council meeting.
Cllr Davis spoke out after seeing an FoI request about the council’s performance in responding to questions.
He said the most recent figures, for the first quarter of the 2025-26 year, showed that 74.2 per cent, or 417 out of 561 cases, received a response within the statutory deadline.
In 2024-25, the council recorded its best performance since 2020, with 90 per cent of cases dealt with within the required time.
But the Information Commissioner’s Office said that a compliance rate of under 90 per cent was “unsatisfactory”.
One reason given for the poor performance in the first quarter of last year, the report said, was a “nervousness around releasing certain information, leading to pressure on the team to agree exemptions”.
The FoI response said that a “culture shift” was needed towards “greater confidence in sharing information and accepting managed risks”.
Other issues raised in the report suggested that FoI staff did not have enough time to engage with records management staff, plus long-term sickness and a vacancy in the information rights team.
Cllr Davis said: “In the council leader’s former role before entering politics, she once said: ‘Without FoI requests, decisions on what to publish will lie with those in power – those with a vested interest in keeping politically embarrassing, contentious or damning information out of public hands’.
“Hopefully, you will agree that it is wrong for FoI officers to be put under pressure by others within the council to agree exemptions in the way suggested and worrying that there is a culture of nervousness around releasing certain information.
“What steps will the administration take not only to address resourcing issues in the FoI team but to encourage openness and transparency from the council and to remove the nervousness and pressure FoI officers say they face when responding to FoI requests?”
Council leader Bella Sankey agreed that she was a “proponent of freedom of information in her previous life when she campaigned to maintain the legislation”.
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She was previously director of Detention Action, deputy director of Reprieve and director of policy at Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties).
She was unaware of the resourcing issues in the FoI team, she said, and would look into them.
“We as a Labour group are very supportive of transparency and openness,” she said.
“That is why we recently commissioned a report into the failings that led us to invest in the i360 under the previous Green leadership of this council.”
She urged the Greens – and in particular the Green chair of the council’s audit, standards and general purposes committee – to consider the i360 report to ensure “the public have full transparency and openness when it comes to that critical decision”.
She said that staff health and wellbeing were important and she was not aware of any undue pressure being put on staff in the FoI team but added that she would look into it.