Dear Mr. Nunn

Freedom of Information Act 2000 - Information Request

Your request for information, received 10 October 2009, has now been considered.

Over the last five years

(1) How many Local Government Act Part III Section 32(3) notices has your council served in a Local Government Ombudsman

This information is not routinely collated by the Council. We believe that the cost of collating the information to respond to your request would exceed the `appropriate limit' of £450 as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. As a result we are refusing this element of your request under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. A full refusal notice is appended to this letter.

You may wish to narrow this element of your request to bring it within the cost threshold, e.g. by narrowing the timescale. If you would like to discuss ways of doing this, please do not hesitate to contact me.

(3) How many times has the Ombudsman concerned found the council guilty of maladministration for misusing a Section 32(3) notice.

The Council has not been found guilty of maladministration for this reason in the last five years.

If you have any queries or concerns or are dissatisfied with the handling of your request please contact:

Freedom of Information Officer

Darlington Borough Council

Corporate Services

Town Hall

Darlington

DL1 5QT

Tel: 01325 388905

E-mail: [Darlington Borough Council request email]

Website: www.darlington.gov.uk/democracy/information_rights

Cont…

If you would like to submit an official complaint about the handling of your request or appeal against a decision to rely on an exception, please use the Council's complaints procedure, details of which can be found on our website at:

www.darlington.gov.uk/complaints

If you do not have access to the Internet please contact the Freedom of Information Officer, using the contact details above, for a copy of the Council's corporate feedback form.

You can also obtain further information from the Information Commissioner at:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF 
Tel:   01625 545 700
Website: www.ico.gov.uk

Enquiries: www.ico.gov.uk/Global/online_enquiries.aspx

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information Officer

Refusal Notice - Section 12 Freedom of Information Act 2000

Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 allows a public authority to refuse a request if the cost of providing the information to the applicant would exceed the `appropriate limit' defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004:

“12 Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

(1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit”.

The Regulations provide that the appropriate limit to be applied to requests received by local authorities is £450 (equivalent to 2.5 days of work). In estimating the cost of complying with a request for information, an authority can only take into account any reasonable costs incurred in:

“(a) determining whether it holds the information,

(b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the information,

(c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the information, and

(d) extracting the information from a document containing it”.

For the purposes of the estimate the costs of performing these activities should be estimated at a rate of £25 per hour.

The information that you have requested is not kept in a statistical format. To collate the information in order to respond to your request we would be required to locate and retrieve the file for every complaint that has been referred to the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) over the last five years. Between 1 January 2005 and 31 March 2009 the Council received 128 new LGO complaints. We estimate that it would take an average of 10 minutes to locate and retrieve each file and extract the relevant information from it; we therefore estimate that the cost of collating this information would be £533.33 (128 x 10/60 = 21.3 hours; 21.3 hours x £25 per hour = £533.33). As a result, we are refusing this element of your request under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

You have the right to appeal against our decision to refuse this element of your request; further details are provided in the letter that accompanies this refusal notice.

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INVESTOR IN PEOPLE

Director : Paul Wildsmith