Response 3816252

Response to request for information

Reference

3816252

Response date

1 October 2025

Request

1. Can you tell me the council's position on the emergence of St George's flags on lamp-posts, roundabouts and elsewhere via non-official origins in the past few months?

2. By conducting a keywords search of the authority's email server, please tell me how many emails appear, separately, for each of the months of May, June, July and August 2025 when searching for the term 'English flag' or 'George's flag''.

3. By conducting a similar search for any occurrence of the terms 'English flag' or 'George's flag' (use the search term 'English flag 'OR' St George's flag' ) please can you provide for me an output of the contents of email exchanges on your server, redacted to ensure no personal information is included, starting with the most recent and going back as far as you can within the time and cost limits specified in the FOI Act - and not extending before 1 July 2025.

NOTE: 

Thanks for your reply – could I therefore refine the request to just incoming complaints to a complaints address or portal? Please also filter out any duplicates, newsletters or google alerts.

Response

1. Can you tell me the council's position on the emergence of St George's flags on lamp-posts, roundabouts and elsewhere via non-official origins in the past few months?

   • The Council follows central government guidelines at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/flying-flags-a-plain-english-guide/flying-flags-a-plain-english-guide

2. By conducting a keywords search of the authority's email server, please tell me how many emails appear, separately, for each of the months of May, June, July and August 2025 when searching for the term 'English flag' or 'George's flag''.

   • English / England Flag
     • July - 0
     • August - 2
     • September - 75
   • St George's Flag
     • July - 0
     • August - 0
     • September - 43

3. By conducting a similar search for any occurrence of the terms 'English flag' or 'George's flag' (use the search term 'English flag 'OR' St George's flag' ) please can you provide for me an output of the contents of email exchanges on your server, redacted to ensure no personal information is included, starting with the most recent and going back as far as you can within the time and cost limits specified in the FOI Act - and not extending before 1 July 2025.

   • After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we are unable to provide the requested information. The cost of locating, retrieving,  extracting and redacting the data exceeds the appropriate limit as defined under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Information provided to revised FOI request.