Engage Barnet portal transfers to a new web location: Failure to transfer all (or substantially all) consultation pages
Received: 23 December 2025
Under the Freedom of Information Act/Environmental Information Regulations please could you respond to the requests below.For your convenience I have provided the context (Parts A & B) behind this request (Part C).Context:(A) Engage Barnet portal moved to a new location:Since around November 2025, Engage Barnet consultations ceased to be listed under engage.barnet.gov.uk, instead they moved to barnet.gov.uk/engage (although now the old URL migrates users to the new one). The previous portal provided access to consultations dating back to 2019, but the new one only publishes information for around 1 year.The move was announced in the 29 October 2025 edition of Barnet First but readers were not informed that 5 years of consultation information would disappear.(B) Document/record retention policyBarnet Council's document/record retention policy can be obtained here: https://open.barnet.gov.uk/dataset/barnet-council-retention-schedule-vdwrn). Some extracts are as follows:- 'Management of routine responses on council actions, policy, or procedures' (e.g. FOIs etc): 5-year retention period (Page 22);- 'Town Centre Management' (e.g. Town Centre Projects engagement and communications): 1-year retention from close of project (Page 39);- 'Regeneration/project management' (e.g. community engagement not related to capital delivery): 10-year retention (Page 41).The document does not refer to webpage retention, there is a clearly thematic similarity between it an the policy (which includes many 6 year retention periods, which could be used as a steer to determine what to do with Engage Barnet).(C) FOI requests/queries1. Please provide a copy (or link to) the policy (or rationale behind) the decision not to transfer substantially all the consultation pages from the old website to the new one.NB: I would expect that Barnet Council owns the copyright to the old webpages (and there should be no barrier to republishing them).2. Does Barnet Council plan to republish older consultation pages on the new site and if so, what basis do you propose to use as a retention period from closing date of a consultation?NB: As a minimum, it would be reasonable for consultations that closed in late December 2019 to be available as at late December 2025 (i.e. retention period of 6 years).(i) Democracy & Public Interest: The Committee for Standards in Public Life's 'Early Warning Signs' report (March 2025) page 4 states: 'Making information available about what an organisation does and how it does it enables the public … to scrutinise its performance…' (see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/recognising-and-responding-to-early-warning-signs-in-public-sector-bodies-report).(ii) Continuity of memory, discovery efficiency and fairness: the full life cycle of a decision for which a consultation was required (proposal, community views, council's considerations and the weblink to the final decision) should be transparent and easy to find. The best discovery route is often the consultation portal - it is not necessarily:-Barnet First is too 'current';-Meetings calendar/committee pages imply a decision has been made, which is not always the case, and even if it is, committee names (and associated URIs) change over time so events can be difficult to trace;-Open Data portal is very useful but potentially overwhelming.It is not fair to burden residents with the task of mining the wrong sources, when retaining historic Engage Barnet content is the simplest thing to do.(iii) 3rd party accountability: Nolan Principles apply to third party service providers to Public Bodies, therefore where they facilitate consultations, their involvement should be transparent for as long as their role is relevant.
Outcome / Documents
- Response (all information to be supplied) - application/pdf - Download