Dear Mr Boucher,

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 - INFORMATION REQUEST

I have considered your request for an internal review in relation to your request for information in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

I have now completed my review, and the outcome is detailed below.

I began the review by looking at the timeline for this request, and the actions subsequently taken and my comments are as follows:

1.1 The request was originally received in the FOI inbox on 8^th March 2010 and was distributed to the FOI coordinator for Children's Services to be actioned.

1.2 The Coordinator checked to see if her service area held the information, and realised that they did not. She returned the request to the FOI inbox to be reallocated to the central Finance team on 9^th March 2010.

1.3 Unfortunately, the fact that the request had been returned to the Inbox was overlooked, so it was not passed to the Finance team to respond. This also meant that the database was not updated to change the service area noted as being responsible for the request and therefore reminders to the coordinator were not received and a response was not sent.

Clearly, this has been a failure of our processes, and I have therefore looked at ways to improve it so that similar failures would not occur in the future.

2.1 One reason that the response was overlooked was that the title bar bore the same words as the original request. I have therefore asked coordinators returning requests allocated to them in error to include the word REALLOCATE in the title bar.

2.2 I have also reviewed the method of monitoring the database; moving from checking random samples to looking at each request logged at the end of each month, to make sure that there are no requests outstanding for no identified reason. We will backdate our review to all requests received since the beginning of the year.

I then asked the central Finance team to look for the Information you requested as a matter of urgency.

You asked the following: “I am interested in the amounts paid by each school in Redbridge to third parties in relation to temporary staffing cover. My hope is to receive an electronic breakdown of amounts paid through the department's purchase ledger by school.

Notes:

I can tell you that the Council does not have a main system that records this information.

The detail is held locally in each school and the only analysis the Council receives is through the Consistent Financial Reporting return sent to the Council's Finance Service. The information shown on the return depends on whether there is a specific CFR code or not. There is only one code regarding Agency Supply. This shows how much a school spends on supply teachers from external suppliers. Supply for admin and Learning Support Assistants does not have its own code and therefore can't be identified without contacting each school individually.

Such an exercise would take a significant amount of staff time (certainly far in excess of the appropriate limit) and for that reason, if you still required the level of detail as specified in your original request, we would have refused it on those grounds .

We have provided instead the information that we do hold, which is the total expenditure per school and I hope that you will find that sufficient.

To summarise:

The review is now concluded.

Once again, please accept my apologies for the failure to respond to your request, but please be assured that we have taken measures to ensure this does not occur again, and to improve our future performance.

If you are dissatisfied with this outcome you may request the Information Commissioner to investigate. The contact details are:

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

Yours sincerely,

FOI Coordinator - Strategic Services

020 8708 2161

www.redbridge.gov.uk