Environmental Health Premises

Each of the 73 territorial authorities in New Zealand (should) have a database of businesses who have Environmental Health licenses.

Some of these businesses include

food premises (anywhere that serves food)
hairdressers
camping grounds
funeral directors
tattoo & skin piercing parlours
brothels
on/off/club licensed premises

We requested this information for the purpose of releasing on the www.zenbu.co.nz local search website under a Creative Commons license.

The project began over 6 months ago and is still going… Almost every request was made by email and a table of the results can be seen here including the contact email of all councils. (Only one of those emails bounced, Waitomo District due to ‘Mailbox Full’. That is their published email address but it has been bouncing ‘Full’ for over 3 months now.) At first we were doing a custom mail merge but recently I have just been Bcc’ing a generic request, both worked the same.

I will note some of the highlights so far.

3 councils have an online search of Food Premises including Ratings (providing ratings of food premises is an optional council bylaw, generally done only in the big cities)

Auckland, Waitakere, North Shore

and 3 others publish PDFs 
Manukau (some data spectacularly out of date e.g.  today Howick-July-2008), Papakura and Rodney

No council publishes information about the other premises with Environmental Health licenses (hairdressers, funeral directors, etc)

Our request was along the lines of

Can you please provide a current digital file (preferably an excel spreadsheet) which includes the trading name, address & license type (e.g. food premise, campground, funeral director etc) of premises currently issued Environmental Health Licences by the council.

This information will be added to the www.zenbu.co.nz NZ local search engine, where the content is freely available to the public under a Creative Commons license.

This is not (or should not) be a difficult request. Many councils responded instantly (government time) with the complete information. The councils charge fees for these licenses so they should know who has them.

As you might expect the quality of response has varied massively with each council, it seems to very much depend on who gets the request and what mood they’re in. It is up to council discretion as to whether they charge a ‘reasonable sum for labour and materials’ and whether they waive that charge. The fees quoted/paid are noted in the results table , one council quoted $50 and then sent the data through unprompted 6 weeks later (Manawatu).

Many were extremely slow in response taking the maximum (or more than) of 20 working days, and others required multiple requests. I note that giving a deadline and mentioning the Ombudsman to the recalcitrant councils seemed to have a hastening affect.

On Dec 24 Upper Hutt told me they required an extension for our request from Dec 10, taking the response date to Feb 13. I prompted them again March 3 and have received no more than an acknowledgement that they are working on it (today is March 10).

2 councils, Napier and Ruapehu, stated they would not provide the information as it was protected under the Privacy Act. I complained to the Ombudsman on the grounds that licenses are obtained by trading businesses and the Privacy Act only applies to ‘natural living persons’ and this complaint was upheld. The councils were given 20 days to respond and now failed to give any response. Another complaint to the Ombudsman finally got the request fulfilled. The whole process took 4 and a half months.

A number of councils (Rotorua, Chathams) could only supply (mainly) postal addresses rather than physical. This is a little mind-boggling as if the licensing was not just a money-making exercise, as those of little faith in government may believe, then surely you would need the physical address to conduct an inspection?! I’m yet to solve that one…

Far North sent a full page letter from a legal executive explaining that it would “take staff considerable time to collate, consider and to process all the relevant documentation …. Therefore the estimated cost is $300 (5 hours x $60) plus any photocopying charges”. (The letter itself probably took 30 minutes to write.) A friend at Whangarei council told me this person obviously had no clue as the information would be available from a single report from the right person. Obviously I never found the right person. This was by far the highest quote.

I found the best councils to deal with were
Auckland, Waitakere, Dunedin, North Shore, New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Nelson & Papakura
Full marks to them. 

As of today  some 15 councils have not responded to the request at all. I resubmitted the request yesterday and will give them another 20 days. By law no response is deemed as a refusal so at that stage I will refer them all to the Ombudsman… stay tuned.