Essex County Council 
 Adults, Health & Community Wellbeing 
 P O Box 297 
 County Hall 
 CHELMSFORD 
 Essex   CM1 1YS 
 
 
Our ref: 
ECC-017122-11/SH 
 
Date: 23rd January 2012 
 
Email Address Provided: 
[FOI #31338 email] 
 
Dear Ms Smith 
 
Re: Freedom of Information Request 5th January 2012 
Thank you for your request for information, which was received by Essex County 
Council on 5th January 2012. 
I am pleased to enclose the following information, which I believe satisfies your request: 
How much does "Connecting Carers" cost to produce? 
Please see the below table which identifies how much the connecting Carers magazine 
costs to print and distribute. 
Design and Print
Design
£879.00
Design VAT
£175.80
Printing of 15,000 hard copies
£2,150.39
Supply of .pdf version for website
£0.00
Supply of text only version for screen readers
£0.00
Hard copy postage
Envelopes
£187.92
Labels (purchasing)
£127.00
Postage 
14,693 posted at 
0.2646 pence each
£3,887.77
Total
£7,407.88 £0.49 UNIT COST
Please note: The postage cost includes discount for bulk postage. The cost should have been lower (discount for 
clean mail) but problems due to transfer from Essex County Council to MITIE meant Connecting Carers could not go 
clean mail on this occasion.
 
Please could you provide the figures for carer’s assessments for both general 
carers across Essex, but particularly for those caring for someone with autism of 
any kind in the last 5 years, and the outcomes. 
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I am not obliged to supply the information 
you have requested.  
 
Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Essex County Council, 
when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to 
provide you the applicant with a notice which: 
(a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states (if that would 
not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies. 
 
The following exemption has been applied: 
 
 

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S12 Cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit.  
 
To provide you with all the information that you have requested this would be above the 
appropriate limit. In estimating whether complying with this request would exceed the 
appropriate limit we have take in to account the following: 
    Determining whether we hold the information;  
 
  Locating the information, or a document containing it;  
 
  Retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and  
 
  Extracting the information from a document containing it.  
 
We do not have a category on our system specifically for Autism, to identify the 
information requested this part of your request would have to be completed manually. 
To search each carer’s assessment would take a minimum of 5 minutes, in Adult Social 
care alone we would have to look through approximately 56,065 carer’s assessments, I 
have calculated that this would exceed 18 hours.  
 
Such costs are calculated at £25 per hour per person for all authorities regardless of the 
actual cost or rate of pay, which means that the limit will be exceeded if these activities 
exceed 24 hours for central government, legislative bodies and the armed forces, and 
18 hours for all other authorities.     
However, I have provided you with the information regarding all carer’s assessments 
carried out by Adult Social Care and the Young Carer’s Team; these figures are 
identified separately below.  
Adult Social Care: 
Please see the table (Appendix 1) of carer’s assessments carried out by Adult’s social 
services, we have been able to provide you with the last 5 financial years. This is broken 
down by separate carer’s assessments, joint carer’s assessments and the amounts of 
Carer’s assessments offered but were declined. I have also broken this down by age 
(18-64 & 65 and over) and by cared for person’s client group (Physical Disability, Mental 
Health, Learning Disability, Substance Misuse and Other Vulnerable People)  
Young Carer’s Team: 
I have also provided the amount of young carer’s assessments that were carried out in 
the last 4 financial years, we are unable to provide further information on this as we do 
not hold this information in a reportable format, we are also unable to break down this 
information further as this information is not categorised the same way as Adult Social 
Care, the total figure of young carers assessments per financial year are shown below: 
2007/08 – 361 
2008/09 – 449 
2009/10 – 671 
2010/11 – 935 
 
 

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Children’s Social Care: 
Assessments in children's services address the needs of the child and their carers in 
one assessment.  The Carers needs are recorded as part of the core assessments and 
as such are not recorded separately. Please clarify if you would like the amount of these 
assessments and I will provide this to you. 
You may reuse all or part of this information free of charge in any format or 
medium.  You must reuse it accurately and not in a misleading context.  The material 
must be acknowledged as Essex County Council copyright and you must give the title of 
the source document/publication. 
Please contact me if you would like further advice or assistance about your request or 
your right to access information held by Essex County Council. 
If you are not satisfied with my response to your request, please let me know.  If I am 
unable to resolve the issue immediately, I will explain our complaints procedure.  
If, after following our complaints procedure, you are still not satisfied, you are entitled to 
ask the Information Commissioner to review our decision.  You can contact him at 
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF, telephone 01625 545700. 
Yours Sincerely 
Stephen Hassett 
Informatics Officer 
Adult Social Care  
Email: [email address] 
 
 
 
 
 

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