Date: 20/08/2009

Dear Mr Houston

Re: Freedom of Information 1346

Thank you for your request dated 12/08/2009 for the following information:

Two questions regarding enforcement of parking restrictions, specifically penalty charge notices.

The information you have requested is held by this authority and can be supplied to you. However you should be aware that the councils charging policy (that has been produced in accordance with fee regulations for freedom of information) requires us to make a charge for all requests that cost more than £450 to retrieve and supply, (which equates to 18 hours of work at £25 per hour).

Therefore in accordance with our charging policy, I am writing to advise you that the majority of the information you have requested will be chargable, estimated at £2,983.10 to retrieve and supply. A breakdown of how this cost was calculated is shown below. The system we use is not supported by our IT department therefore we are unable to extract the data and create a report. The alternative would be to go to the supplier to produce a report of the details you require and we do not know what that cost would be but estimate that this would exceed £450.

Estimating the costs of processing requests

When estimating the cost of complying with a written request for Information, the Council will take into account the staff time involved in the following activities:

In order to gather the information you have requested we would need to print out from the system the pages that contain the data. In this case, the estimation has been based on the following:

It has been estimated that there are 4478 pages going back to April 2005, we would then need to redact any third party data and photocopy.

1 hour for 4478 detailed ticket reports to be printed. 1 minute per page to have sensitive information blacked out in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. 2 hours to photocopy print outs to ensure sensitive information is not readable after blacking out. 7 hours to locate paper records pre-dating the ICPS system and extract information removing all third party data.

74.5 hours x £25 = £1,862.5 + £50 + £175 = £2087.5 plus £895.6 disbursements = £2,983.10

Total (estimate): £2,983.10 this is not including additional costs of providing the transaction details that are the date, time and method of payments from the Cashiers system.

Information we can supply:

With regards to Question 2. The Council does not use any kind of incentive or bonus system and the software provider is ICPS. The data fields recorded are Vehicle registration, make of vehicle, ticket reference, date & time issued, officer, offence and location. The system is not linked to any other data sets.

Therefore in accordance with our charging policy, I am writing to advise you that the information you have requested will cost at least £2,983.10 to reproduce and supply not including the payments details.

It is possible that we may be able to reduce the above cost by defining the search more thoroughly. If you wish to contact the office to discuss this then please do so.

If you would like to continue with your original request and agree to pay the cost stated above, please send a cheque made payable to Thurrock Council to the address at the top of this letter. Please ensure you enclose the paying in slip attached with your payment. If payment is not received within 3 months the council will have no further obligation to provide you with the information requested.

Please note that your request for the information mentioned above will not continue until full payment has been received and cleared, therefore the 20 working days in which we have to respond to your original request is suspended until payment is received.

If you are unhappy with the council's response you can make a complaint via the councils complaints procedures and this will be looked into. If you remain unhappy with the decision you may then appeal to the Information Commissioner.

Yours faithfully,

Clive Collins

Freedom of Information Co-ordinator

Telephone (01375) 652917

Macro FOI.Disbursement.Fee.letter

Macro FOI.Disbursement.Fee.letter