A SENIOR Wirral politician is demanding "more openness and transparency" from the council after a series of rulings by the UK data watchdog.

The call came after the Information Commissioner's Office upheld 13 complaints in the last year about the local authority wrongly refusing to answer questions or release information within the legal time limit.

Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Phil Gilchrist accused the town hall of using excessive secrecy when dealing with Freedom of Information requests.

He said of 18 recent complaints, 72% had been backed by the ICO.

The council has questioned the accuracy of his figures and revealed they have recently appointed a solicitor to help speed up FoI response times.

Councillor Gilchrist said: “The high share of decisions against the council does not bode well.

"The council appears to be casting around for grounds to block requests.

“I looked at the cases over the past year challenged by people whose requests were refused.

"They had to back down when the commissioner stepped in removing the barriers set up by Wirral.

“There’s something amiss here - something is wrong with Wirral’s attitude."

He has tabled a notice of motion to Monday night's meeting of the full council demanding more transparency and warning the current situation is causing "reputational damage."

The council's strategic director Joe Blott said: “We would have to take issue with the information supplied here, which states that between September 2014, and August 2015, 72% of complaints to the ICO were upheld.

“The summary of information on the ICO website about Wirral covers the period from February 2012 and January 2015, when the council received 3,975 FoI requests.

"Of these, the ICO upheld 42 complaints, representing 1.1% of all requests received."

“We consistently achieve upwards of an 85% response rate to FoIs received, which is the ICO performance target.

“It currently stands at 96% for July and 95% for August.

“By far the most common upheld complaint is that the response was not issued within the statutory time period and we are appointing to enable us to improve our response times.”