Dear Mr Cannell

Information Request: FR1825

Thank you for your Information Request dated 11 March 2010. Your request has been dealt with under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Your request is detailed below in italics together with the Council's response.

Please provide to me figures for the period from January 2004 to March 2010 showing the number of directions or other hearings in family courts where other parties were said to be not contactable i.e.(No Address) and the percentage of hearings that this represents or the total number of relevant hearings during that period.

Please also provide the total number of non contested hearings in family courts for the same period where the authority have been allowed to obtain orders or directions without opposition as cases of notifications not reaching other parties also appear to be common.

Unfortunately, I have estimated that the time it will take to undertake the necessary search, retrieval and preparation work that will enable us to respond to the request you have made will exceed the fee limit as set out in the Appropriate Limit and Fees Regulations. Therefore, the Council is not obliged to provide a response and I will not be processing your request further. For information purposes, the fee limit set down by the Regulations is £450 and in our case this equates to a maximum of 18 hours' of search and retrieval time.

Legal Services do not specifically record this data.

To obtain the information each file from January 2004 would have to be searched manually.

This information would either be recorded in a Court Order which would be contained in the “Applications and Orders” section of our court bundle, in a social work statement contained in the “statement” section, in the “preliminary” documents section or information presented orally to Court and therefore recorded within the correspondence section of a file.

The Council has 1296 proceedings which would need to be searched (from 1st April 2004 to 1st April 2010). The aforementioned sections of each would have to be searched.

Five files were selected at random and a senior child care solicitor obtained an average for the size of each section which would have to be read as follows:

Preliminary Documents section - 33 pages

Applications and Orders section - 59 pages

Statement section (social work documents only) - 48 pages

Correspondence file - 190 pages

A number of pages from each section for each file were then selected and the solicitor timed how many could be read at a speed which would allow the information to be identified should it exist. This exercise was undertaken 10 times to obtain an average:Number of pages skimmed to obtain information per minute - 12

Time per file therefore - 27 minutes 30 seconds

1296 x 27 minutes 30 seconds is 594 hours to obtain the information required.

However, you should be advised that a modified request will be given due consideration provided the work involved does not, again, exceed the fee limit. Any modification to your request will be treated as a new request for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act.

Please contact me again if you require any further assistance on this matter and I will do my best to provide relevant help and advice.

We are obliged to advise you that the disclosure to you of the enclosed information does not give you the right to reproduce or publish such information without the express permission of the County Council or any other owners of the copyright therein.

If you have any queries please do come back to me in the first instance. If you are unhappy with my response, you can ask the Council to review it. To do this please write to the following address:

Paul Edwards

Head of Business Intelligence and Performance

Northamptonshire County Council

PO Box 93

County Hall

Northampton NN1 1AN

If our internal review does not resolve the issue to your complete satisfaction, you have the right to apply to the Information Commissioner for a decision at the following address:

Information Commissioner

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilsmslow

Cheshire SK9 5AF.

Or, if you have any complaints in respect of your information request please complete the on-line comments form that can be found at www.northamptonshire.gov.uk, along with a full set of guidance.

Yours sincerely

Maria Damigos

Senior Freedom of Information/Data Protection Officer

Legal & Democratic Services

Northamptonshire County Council

Please ask for: Maria Damigos

Tel: 01604 236707

Our ref: FR1825/MAD

Your ref:

Date: 7 April 2010

Northamptonshire County Council

County Hall

PO Box 136

Northampton, NN1 1AT

w. www.northamptonshire.gov.uk

t. 01604 236707

f. 01604 237004

e. [email address]