Whistleblowing reports

I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 regarding your organisation's handling of sexual harassment reports and related policies for the years 2022, 2023, and 2024 (to date).

1. How many reports or complaints of sexual harassment or inappropriate sexual conduct has your organisation received in each of the past three calendar years?

2. What is your organisation's formal policy for handling reports of sexual harassment?

3. Do you classify reports of sexual harassment as "whistleblowing reports" under your current policies?

4. Please provide the total number of whistleblowing reports your organisation has received in each of the last three years, and indicate how many of these related specifically to sexual harassment.
 

I can confirm that the information requested is held by Lincolnshire County Council (LCC). I have detailed below the information that is being released to you.

1. Section 12 Exemption – Our cases are not broken down into Sexual Harassment/Inappropriate Sexual Content, which means we would need to identify which case applies out of a larger number of grievances.

This would take over 18 hours Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information 2000 does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit is currently £450 or 18 hours at a cost of £25 per hour. The exemption under section 12 is not subject to the public interest test Any refined request will be treated as a new request under the Freedom of Information Act

2. Employee resolution(Grievance) Policy and Procedure- Policy Overview - Lincolnshire County Council and Disciplinary Policy and Procedure - Policy Overview - Lincolnshire County Council

LCC also have information relating to ‘Unacceptable Behaviour on the intranet page

3. LCC have a separate whistleblowing policy Whistleblowing Policy - Scope - Lincolnshire County Council

4. LCC publish as part of the UK Local Government Transparency Code, our whistleblowing figures every year on the public site. The numbers requested would be part of that. There were 88 reported within the time frame with none of them related to sexual harassment.