Neil Davies
Chief Economist and Head of Division for Defence Economic Statistics &
Advice
Defence Analytical Services & Advice
MINISTRY OF DEFENCE
Main Building
Whitehall, London SW1A 2HB
Telephone: 020 7218 9000 (switchboard)
Mr
Daniel
Sedlacek
FOI
Ref:
20-08-2010-103040-001
DASA
Ref:
D/AS(F&L)/10/1/18
Date
8th September 2010
Dear Mr Sedlacek
1.
Your correspondence dated 19 August 2010 has been considered to be a request for
information in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. You requested the
following information:
“I am writing this in order to make a request in accordance with the Freedom of Information
Act. I require the following,
i) Your receipt budget for 2009 and 2010, broken down by institutions you receive money
from, including the amount of money received from each.
ii) Your spending budget for 2009 and 2010, broken down by organisation units - divisions,
departments or other institutions who you finance.”
2.
I am writing to confirm that we hold information on the subject you have requested. .
3.
With regards to receipts, summary information is available in MOD’s annual accounts, in
Table 13 - Income on page 76 of the 2009-10 report and Table 11 - Income on page 222 of
the 2008-09 report. The annual accounts are available on the MOD website at the following
address:
http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/CorporatePublications/AnnualReports/
On expenditure there is summary information that shows expenditure by Top Level Budget
(TLB) within MOD in the annual UK Defence Statistics (UKDS) publication at Table 1.5.
(Please see below for further information about TLBs.) UKDS for financial years up to
2008-09 is available online at the following address:
http://www.dasa.mod.uk/applications/newWeb/www/index.php?page=67&pubType=1&thisc
ontent=10&date=2009-09-30
UKDS for the financial year 2009-10 (UKDS 2010) will be published on 29 September 2010.
TLBs are budgetary areas within MOD and are explained on pages 34 and 35 of Defence
Framework, which is available on the MOD website at the following address:
http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/CorporatePublications/PolicyStrategyand
Planning/DefenceFramework.htm.
Summary expenditure information detailing payments over £5 million made to MOD
suppliers is given in Table 1.17 of UKDS 2009 and Table 1.18 of UKDS 2008.
You may be interested to know that in accordance with Government policy to increase
transparency of expenditure information MOD will be publishing information on all its
payments over £25,000 made from 1 April 2010. Information for April to September 2010
will be published by the end of October and then monthly after that. There are no plans to
produce similar information on receipts.
4.
However, if you require details of every organisation that has made payments to MOD and
every organisation to which MOD has made payments in the past two years then I regret that
the costs for which we are permitted to charge in providing this information will exceed the
appropriate limit. This appropriate limit is specified in regulations and for central
government is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3 and a
half working days in determining whether the Department holds the information, and
locating, retrieving and extracting the information. To give you an idea of the scale of the
task involved, MOD processes over £20 billion of bill payments and raises 60,000 invoices
which recover approximately £1 billion of debt per year. Under the terms of Section 12 of
the FOI Act, this means that we are not obliged to comply with your request.
5.
If you are not satisfied with this response or you wish to complain about any aspect of the
handling of your request, then you should contact me in the first instance. If informal
resolution is not possible and you are still dissatisfied then you may apply for an independent
internal review by contacting the Head of Corporate Information, 6th Floor, MOD Main
Building, Whitehall, SW1A 2HB (e-mail [email address]). Please note that any request for
an internal review must be made within 40 working days of the date on which the attempt to
reach informal resolution has come to an end.
6.
If you remain dissatisfied following an internal review, you may take your complaint to the
Information Commissioner under the provisions of Section 50 of the Freedom of Information
Act. Please note that the Information Commissioner will not investigate your case until the
MOD internal review process has been completed. Further details of the role and powers of
the Information Commissioner can be found on the Commissioner's website,
http://www.ico.gov.uk.
7.
I hope the above information is helpful, if you have any queries please don’t hesitate to
contact me.
Yours sincerely,
Neil Davies
