forestgatedotnet

Hat tip to former councillor Andrew Baikie for his recent Freedom of Information request, asking how much constituent casework each councillor has been logging on the council’s i-Casework system.

He asked:

Please can you provide:

Data (numbers thereof) for Member (Councillor ) Enquiries logged by Newham Council between May 9th 2022 and May 8th 2023, broken down by :

1. Each Ward

2. Within 1) then broken down by individual Ward Member.

Although it took the information governance team an age to respond, they eventually did.

The data comes with a mild health warning: although i-Casework is the primary system for managing member enquiries (i.e. casework)…

…Councillors have a number of ways of raising issues on behalf of their constituents, or helping their constituents to raise issues themselves through the most appropriate channels, such as the Council website and online forms. Similarly councillors may refer issues directly to services for their direct action and assistance. Where councillors have assisted their constituents in these ways they would not be recorded centrally on the casework system. As such, the data shared below should be treated as only a partial representation of all of the casework that councillors undertake as we are aware that a significant amount of casework does get administered and managed ‘off’ of the i-casework system through emails and other channels of contact.

So, to the data. Broken down by ward

And by councillor. The original response sorts the results by ward, but I have put them in rank order

Even given the health warning that not all casework flows through the system there is a remarkable variance between the casework being logged across the council.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Tags: Casework