Surrey & Borders Trust & its PPI Forum Delay Responses to FOIA Requests

Jill and others have been trying to get the Surrey & Borders Partnership NHS Trust and the Surrey & Borders Patient & Public Involvment Forum to answer their Freedom of Information requests for some time now but both of these bodies have resisted providing information and the PPI in particular has been frosty and unhelpful with members of the public who have expressed an interest in the appalling treatment of the disabled workers at the Trust's Old Moat Garden Centre.

The Surrey & Borders PPI Forum has not provided the information I requested either but the forum manager, Kent based I might add, was very quick to insist that the garden centre matter involved an individual and as such the forum would not be able to look at it or comment openly.

In fact the Trust's decision to cut the £3 a day it was paying to its garden centre workers is a general problem that came about through a Trust-wide change in policy. Furthermore, the out of pocket garden centre workers , their relatives and friends and ordinary members of the public have been totally outraged by and have expressed a very keen interest in this issue , one that has also been covered extensively in the local media and condemned by a local MP. So one has to ask why the Surrey & Borders PPI is going over board to play this matter down and keep it under wraps?

Wwere the PPI Forum members complicit in the paycuts?

Do they get more in expenses than the £3 a day the garden centre workers used to get before it was cut?

Is the Surrey & Borders PPI Forum part of the problem here ?

Well we shall soon have a partial answer as the Forum Co-ordinator/Local Manager is now sending the following statement out to people waiting for the PPI Forum and Trust to respond to their FOIA requests.

The Forum members met with representatives from the Surrey & Borders
Partnership Trust on June 14th . Minutes of this meeting will be available after their next meeting this Wednesday.

The Forum Manager very generously agreed to provide this minimum information, which is a public document anyway , on or around 13th of July, almost a month after she could have kept people informed of developments and well outside the FOIA period.

I personally find it very sad that the NHS and the undemocratic quangos around it pay large salaries to officious and unhelpful functionaries who appear to have nothing but utter contempt for the public while Surrey & Borders NHS Trust claws back pennies from its disabled workers and expect them to work for nothing.