Information Access Team

Shared Services Directorate

2 Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DF

Switchboard 020 7035 4848

E-mail: [email address] Website: www.homeoffice.gov.uk

Mr Dr. Geraint Bevan Our Ref: 10957

Date: 18 March 2009

[FOI #5395 email]

Dear Dr Bevan ,

I am writing further to my letter of 26h January 2009, regarding your request for an internal review of the response to your Freedom of Information request.

I have now completed a full review of the handling of your request and the decision to inform you that it could not be answered within the £600 cost limit. This request has been treated on its own merits and all information originally considered has been re-considered as part of the Internal Review.

The first part of my review concerned the timeliness of our response to your original request. As a result of my considerations, I am aware that a period of 11 working days passed between the date of your request being received, and the date a final response was sent to you. This is in line with the 20 working days specified in Section 10(1) of the Act

Furthermore, I have reviewed the original decision to invoke the cost limit when responding to an FOI request under Section 12 of the Act.

Your FOI request asked for “details of licences granted for animal testing for research funded wholly or in part by cosmetics companies for each year since 1997. Specifically, I would like to know the year of issue, project aims and expected benefits associated with each licence.” You also indicated that “If the cost of providing this information would be prohibitive, I am most interested in more recent years, so please bring forward the cut-off date if necessary.”

The final response letter stated that the Home Office may “hold some information in which you are interested, but have estimated that the cost of answering your request, even with respect to the last two calendar years, would exceed the £600 limit and we are therefore unable to comply with it. For each calendar month approximately 60 applications would have to be examined, which on average would take 30 minutes an application; a cost of £750.”

I have investigated the accuracy of the figures provided to you by reference to one month's project licences.. In December 2008 56 applications for a project licence were recorded. Applications are typically highly technical documents 30+ pages in length, and there is not section of the application which requires the sourcing of the research funding is declared. It would take at least 30 minutes per application to extract the information. I therefore conclude that the time taken to extract the information just from within one month's applications would be £700. This is in excess of the cost limit detailed in Section 12 of the Act.

As previously identified to you, The £600 limit applies to all central government departments and is based on work being carried out at a rate of £25 per hour, which equates to 3½ days work per request, which then equates to 24 consecutive hours of working.

You mentioned in your request for an internal review that “I do not consider it reasonable that my request for information was rejected on cost grounds without any attempt to reduce the period.” In response to this may I point out that the caseworker did in this case consider the possibility of reducing the time period to last two calendar years and even considered a period of just one month. The response to your request provided information which demonstrated that providing information for either of these periods would exceed the cost limit.

The issue here is that the information you have requested is not easily accessible. The information is stored in paper format only and to identify, retrieve and extract the information from within (on average) a 50-60 page application is not an easy feat. It is for this reason that I have decided to uphold the original response in this case. However if you still wish to ascertain the information you have requested under the Section 12 cost limit, then I suggest that the only possible refinement to your request is to limit the request to a single period of 2-3 weeks.

I would like to re-iterate that this letter represents the results of a full internal review in to the handling of your request and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in the Home Office.

Should you remain dissatisfied after this internal review you have the right of complaint to the Information Commissioner, as established by section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act. You can write to him at:

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely,

Martin Riddle

Information Access Consultant

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Annex B

The Constitution Unit, a research body at University College London, is carrying out an independent evaluative study of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 in co-operation with a number of public authorities, including the Home Office. An important part of the evaluation process is gathering the experiences and opinions of FOI requesters like you. Any information you provide will be handled in accordance with the privacy policy explained in the survey.

If you would like to take part in this study, please click the following link to be taken directly to the survey http://tinyurl.com/58zq2f Or, if you prefer, contact Ben Worthy at [email address] or on 020 7679 4974 to ask more about the study.

If you have filled this survey out before, UCL invite you to fill it out again in light of the recent response to your request.