As a regular user of the Freedom of Information Act, I have become used to delays when councils and other public bodies ponder whether they want to give me the information I have asked for. (Very often they choose not to.)

Under the law, authorities have up to 20 working days to respond to requests - the key words being "up to". I've never done an anaylsis but I suspect well over half my requests come back on Day 20.

But just as frustrating are the delays I've experienced when appealing against request refusals, which there are rather a lot of, to the Information Commissioner. That's the independent watchdog who oversees FOI.

Take our appeal over Kent County Council's refusal to tell us what other sites it considered for its planned Operation Stack car park along the M20. KCC said that there was no public interest in where these other sites were as they had been discounted - prompting the obvious question about why they could not be identified?

We appealed in October last year and I've just had a letter from the ICO saying there has been a "very high volume of complaints since January 2005." As a result, there is a "signficant backlog of cases" and as things stand, our appeal has yet to be allocated to a case officer. But never mind. I'm told they will write to me "every twelve weeks" to keep me up-to-date on progress.

Jargon bingo corner.

It seems that someone at County Hall has been overdosing on management mumbo-jumbo pills. My attention has been drawn to a report being presented to councillors tomorrow (Thursday March 26)about improving access to various public services in Kent.

To say it's heavy going is something of an under-statement. It sets out the business case for something called "Access Kent."

Apparently - at least according to the vision statement - "Access Kent will deliver public access for the 21st century. It is a multichannel, partnership approach, putting choice and personalisation at the heart of the service. Putting the customer first means not only delivering a consistent and coherent experience and looking beyond organisational boundaries, but also value for money for Kent tax-payers."

Yes, yes but how will this vision be achieved, I hear you ask? Well do not fear. The vision will be achieved by "addressing silos within services by aligning front and back-office systems and business processes to be more joined-up in how we work."

You want more? Well, the key to understanding all this is to take heed of someone called Thomas Friedman, who is quoted in the introduction to the report to this effect.

“The most important lesson: think horizontally.The world is moving from aplace where value was created in vertical silos of command and control to a world where value is increasingly going to be created horizontally by how you connect and collaborate - how you synthesise this with that.”

Exactly what I'm thinking - I need to lie down horizontally somewhere in a dark room...