The Challenge

Herefordshire County Council were manually redacting 3,500 planning and 160 subject access and FOI / EIR requests per year.

The average planning application is 60 pages in size and other files requested can contain up to 1,000 pages resulting in significant time spent redacting documents prior to release.

Based on an average manual processing time of 2 minutes per page, it is estimated that the Hereford team were dedicating 7,000 man hours to manual redaction archives per annum.

Before using e-Redact all client cases were in a paper format and a marker pen was used to remove sensitive information from a photocopy of the original. Processing these paper documents was very time consuming. Some paperwork had to be photo copied more than twice as the information was still visible under the marker pen. This process also gave the council team significant concern about the security of information being redacted manually.

The Strategy

e-Redact was chosen as the councils preferred redaction solution as a result of a formal tender process.

The software was selected as the most financially viable available and has since exceeded all expectations both from time saved and ease an simplicity of use perspective.

Security and the professional appearance of the redacted file output have also been hugely beneficial.

50% time saving benefits have been made with the processing of planning application requests and 40% for the FOI / EIR subject Access requests.

The solution has allowed us to achieve file redaction more quickly. The working copy feature is also really useful for saving larger case files when they are part processed.

Working electronically has also resulted in significant time savings and output can now be emailed to the requester saving costs on both photo copying and postage.

The Result