Leicestershire County Council

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 will allow the public to access all types of information held by local authorities – whether published or not – subject to a limited range of exemptions. Exemptions include personal information and commercially sensitive information. The Act will come fully into force on 1st January 2005. More information about the Act is available on our main Freedom of Information page.

There is also more general information available from the Information Commissioner.

What is a Publication Scheme?

As the first step towards implementing the Freedom of Information Act, public authorities were required to produce a Publication Scheme and make it available to the public from 28th February 2003. The Publication Scheme has to indicate all the classes of information that the authority is committed to publishing. It also has to show how the information is made available (e.g. in print or on a website) and whether there is a charge for the information.

The County Council’s approved Publication Scheme is now available on this website. This scheme sets out:

• Classes of information published by LCC
• How the information can be obtained
• Any charge made for the information

LCC has arranged its classes within two broad areas – information relating to the organisation in general, and information relating to services provided. Within these two broad areas, a series of sub-areas have been identified.

The scheme also provides more detail on the background, and proposed procedures for requesting information.

The Approved Publication Scheme is a pdf document and can be viewed via Adobe Acrobat.

       Help with file formats used on this website

(We are currently redesigning the Scheme to make access to the documents within the various classes far easier than at present. This will include new hyperlinks to all relevant documents available on our website.)

The draft publication scheme was consulted with local residents and partners from 14th October to 13th December 2002. Feedback from the consultation was incorporated in a revised scheme which was submitted to the Information Commissioner in December 2002. This was approved on 14th February 2003 and is the version which will be accessed by the above link.

Requests for information listed in the Scheme as available by post can be made in writing to: