Dear Mr Houston,

Re: Freedom of Information Act 2000, Response to Appeal 

Reference No: 73536

We have now considered your appeal (email dated 18 August 2009) of our response to you. We apologise that this review response has been sent to you just outside of 20 working days after receiving your appeal. This delay is due to our current workload commitments. In summary, we uphold our original decision to apply Section 12 to your specific requests concerning parking ticket data. We now provide you with a more detailed explanation of this decision.

1. Upholding of Application of Section 12

You have appealed our decision to apply Section 12 of the 2000 Act to your specific request for the raw data set of parking tickets issued in the name of the Council within the last five year period broken down by: date, time, location, narrative of infraction, current status of case, next status of case, transaction details (i.e. date, time and method of payments made), officer ID.

You have advised us that the data might possibly be extracted within the appropriate fees limit by

using 'front end reporting' features of the system we utilise to record PCN details. We thank you for your technical advice on a possible data extraction. However, in this case, the department which holds the requested information is not able to extract the information in this way. Such expertise as you have suggested is not held within this department. This is because the database technical support is contracted out. We are only obliged to provide information which is readily accessible within the Council under the 2000 Act.

We are only able to undertake an extraction as we originally described to you. This of course, would require more than 18 hours of staff time and significant costs for printing (over 3,000 pages). We uphold our application of Section 12 to this specific request.

2. Handling of request

You stated in your appeal that you request an internal review into the handling of your request. You stated that you think it should be possible to extract the requested information in the format requested within the appropriate fees limit. You have not indicated any other aspects of the request handling that you are appealing against.

We consider that you have now been provided with a full explanation of why the information is not held in a readily accessible format and that if any retrieval of information was carried out that this would be above the appropriate fees level.

We hope that you find this decision satisfactory. You have a further right of appeal against this decision, which you can do so in writing, stating your reasons to the regulating body, the Information Commissioner's Office. Contact details: http://www.ico.gov.uk/ or 08456 30 60 60 or Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.

Yours sincerely

Georgina Chambers
Corporate Information and Records Manager

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