What do others think of a ‘Persistent communications’ policy?

Question

With which the council will decide who is ‘persistently communicating’ and find ways to stop them doing it. This could apparently include advising other people of their ‘persistent communicating’ though it’s not clear whether it’s just to shame them or protect someone else from being ‘persistently communicated’ with.

Answer 1

On the basis of the information you have given I would say such a policy will be futile and have the potential for making matters worse.

Answer 2

Any council that seeks to dissuade external communication has forgotten what they exist to do.
They need to give their heads a wobble.

Answer 3

Perhaps the council should look at the definitions of persistent and vexatious along side their obligations to uphold democracy and remember who actually put them in their position. Also looking at why someone would needs to be "persistent". Could it be that the council has avoided actually answering whatever the "persistent" person has asked thereby necessitating the alleged persistence to continue?

Comments

Perhaps they should - and when they are being persistent and vexatious and are never happy what do you do? Let them continue wasting hours of officer time?

Answer 4

I think until you've had an issue like this, it is difficult to imagine how the situation arises and what to do about it.  In a past role, I had an individual who started by asking about the council's "attitude to health and safety".  We treated it as a FOI and send copies of the H&S Policy document, monitoring reports etc.  He kept on, writing several times a day about "attitude" to subjects and each time was pointed towards policy documents etc. many of which clearly showed "attitude" in terms of statements like "the council takes X seriously" or whatever and followed by the steps being taken to support that.  He was never satisfied and for a period of about six weeks sent upwards of 300 emails, taking up staff time both in responding and copying multiple documents (he wanted them posted, not emailed).  Suddenly he stopped and we heard he'd started on a local charity with the same demands.  However much we wanted to respond it was never good enough.
Frankly, I don't think a policy would have helped either but we had reached the point when he did stop of considering ignoring the multiple emails and letters as they were just too time consuming and we were getting no where.

Comments

That does sound pretty awful. I’m sorry to hear that you went through that. However that is not happening here.

Answer 5

We have a vexatious policy to deal with this. We have a resident at the moment who is doing the same constant bombardment of emails on one subject and he will only be happy when we agree with him, even though he is wrong in his thoughts