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GDC accepts its response to an FOI request “was not correct” and “less than helpful”

A recent FOI request Questions to the Council - Council Meetings - a Freedom of Information request to General Dental Council - WhatDoTheyKnow has thrown up more chaos within the GDC about how it stores and processes data.

At each GDC Council meeting there is an agenda item “Questions from the Public”. There is a form on the GDC website for questions the Council about the upcoming Council meeting Send Enquiry This form invites questions relating to specific agenda items in the Council Papers for the next meeting. This presupposes that the papers are published sufficiently in advance of the Council meeting so that the papers can be considered and a question raised. In the minutes published with the papers for the next meeting it is faithfully recorded that there were no questions from the public.

The first FOI question asked about the interval between publication of the Council papers and the Council meetings for the past couple of years – a period that covered 10 Council meetings. In 4 out of 10 the papers were published 3 days in advance, in another 4, that interval was 4 days, and in the final two there were intervals of 1 and 2 days.

At the time of the FOI request, the Council webform asked that questions should be submitted at least three working days in advance of the Council meeting, which meant that in 6 of the 10 meetings that was never possible, because the papers were not published in sufficient time.

The initial FOI request also asked for the number of questions submitted, and of those, how many had been put to the Council under the agenda item. The first response was that no questions had been submitted. This writer had submitted at least two questions within the relevant period, and was aware of others that had submitted questions so sought an internal review of the response to the FOI request, because that initial response was simply not true.

The internal review is now complete and has been published Questions to the Council - Council Meetings - a Freedom of Information request to General Dental Council - WhatDoTheyKnow in which the GDC accepts that it “made a mistake” in its initial response and that the first response was “less than helpful”. The GDC states that “some teams within the GDC misunderstood your request and as a result full searches were not carried out”.  It is difficult to see how a simple question can be misunderstood so badly. The GDC had acknowledged the questions raised via the webform, so there was no doubt that the questions had been received.

It emerges from the internal review that there were 10 questions submitted within the relevant period, none of which were passed to the Council at all. Contrary to the impression given on the webform, questions are filtered out according to whether or not the question “fell within the remit of the Council” which is not immediately obvious to anyone looking on the GDC website. If not, the questions are simply passed to the relevant area of the business for a response. In the unlikely event that a question falls within the remit of the Council, it is passed to the Chair and Chief Executive. This happened on one occasion, and even then, the question was not put to the whole Council, it was dealt with by the Governance team.

Why does the GDC bother to have an agenda item inviting questions from the public? It is far from clear to anyone how a question is diverted away from the Council. The process is opaque to say the least and contrary to transparent governance.  This writer’s question to the Council in the autumn of 2024 concerned the further delay in the Scope of Practice guidance. The Guidance had been passed for publication by the Council in private session, but when it was presented to stakeholders there were many problems with the document requiring further work. The writer raised the question so that the non-executive members of Council would be made aware of this continuing incompetence in the executive team. Not surprisingly the Executive filtered that question out and passed it for a bland response from the team dealing with Scope of Practice.

Yet again the question arises as to the role of the appointed non-executive directors. How can they scrutinise the Executive team if any questions that might trigger uncomfortable conversations at Council are filtered out by the very same executive team that might be being criticised. This all sounds very Post Office.

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