Dear Mr Woodley,

Re: - Request for Information

Thank you for your request for information, which was received by Manchester City Council on 12 April 2010 and has been considered under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FoIA).

I set out below your request for information:

I regret that the Council does not hold the information within the precise description specified in your request. Without manually interrogating each account, the information held by the Council does not differentiate between companies and sole traders. Even if a manual interrogation took place I am not confident that the accuracy of my records is sufficient to ensure personal information was not divulged.

Even if it could be considered that the Council does hold the precise information you are seeking, it is clear the estimated time required to manually check each account to establish the nature of the ratepayer would exceed the cost of compliance set out in the FoIA Fees Regulations. The statutory cost limit is set at £450 and this represents the equivalent of 18 officer hours. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 does not require the Council to comply with requests where it estimates the officer time required to locate, retrieve and extract the information would exceed this threshold. If you require more information about the Council's Fees & Charges Policy, this may be downloaded from:

http://www.manchester.gov.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=1322&pageNumber=1 If you do not have internet access and require a paper copy, please let me know.

I consider that the Council would not be able to disclose personal information relating to private individuals as personal information about their identity and financial affairs is protected under the absolute exemption provided by Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This exemption applies where the disclosure of the information, so far as it comprises or contains personal information about individuals, would contravene one or more of the data protection principles under the Data Protection Act 1998, including the principle that information should be processed lawfully and fairly. Without the consent of an individual rate payer I do not consider that the release of this information into the public domain under FoIA could be justified under any of the processing conditions provided under Schedule 2 of the Data Protection Act.

Although business organisations are not private individuals and are not subject to the protection afforded by the terms of the Data Protection Act, these organisations provide their contact information in the expectation that this information is solely for use in the collection of business rates. They certainly would not expect that their contact information to be released into the public domain.

In an effort to assist you however I have attached a file that provides the addresses and rateable values of all assessments within this authority where small business rate relief has not been awarded. The billing authority references for these assessments are already publicly available.

Please note if you are not satisfied with this response you may ask for an internal review. If you wish to complain you should contact Lynn Evans, Information Compliance Officer who is based at the Town Hall.

If you require more information about the Council's access to information complaints procedure this is available at section 25 of the Council's Code of Practice which can be downloaded from:

http://www.manchester.gov.uk/freedom/request

If you do not have internet access and require a paper copy, please let me know.

If you decide to apply and are not satisfied with the outcome of the internal review, you also have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision.

The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.

Paul Byrne

Business Rates Manager

Business Rates Section

PO Box 466

Manchester M16 6AT