Journal
Preparing a council desk for an internal look at breaches
When a council desk is asked to explain a rise in breaches, the first instinct is to write a narrative. The better first step is to freeze the extract: same columns, same period, same filters the published figure used. If the published figure was a dashboard screenshot, write down the filters before anyone changes them.
We then ask for the glossary that sits behind the published SLA. ‘Two hours’ might mean two advertised hours, two clock hours, or two hours excluding time spent with a third-party supplier. Audit will ask. The covering note should say which one you used in the quarter under review, even if you wish you had used another.
Major-incident weeks should be visible, not deleted. Removing them after the fact looks like grooming. Chart them, mark them, and say how many tickets sat under the parent record. If the parent was kept open as a parking place, the child clocks may be meaningless — that is a finding, not a failure of drawing.
FOI and member enquiries sometimes share a queue with password resets. If that is your world, split them in the extract if you can. If you cannot, the pack should not pretend a single first-response target fits both.
Our investigation notes for this kind of work list what the file supports and what needs interviews. We stop short of legal language. If the audit needs statements from named officers, that is a different piece of work and we will say so rather than stretch a CSV.