xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
DE00000388788
Dear Mr Collingbourne,
Thank you for your further email of 10 February requesting, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the contents of any freetext fields as referred to in our previous reply (our ref: DE00000381002) about the NHS Trusts’ TRU and TFR financial returns. I have been asked to reply.
The Department estimates that the total cost of answering your original request was £1,252.50. This has been calculated using the standard cost per hour laid out in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) guidance. The calculation of the cost showed Departmental staff spending a total of 50.1 hours on the request. The MoJ hourly rate guidance is set at £25, which meant that the total cost of your first request came to £1252.50.
It should also be noted that the Department had not chosen to exercise its rights under section 12 of the FOIA, which relates to cost limits. Section 12 provides that a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request if it would take more than 3.5 working days or £600 to do so.
When providing the data requested in DE00000381002, we released all numerical data held in the TRU and TFR forms for the relevant years. We did not provide any text held in “freetext” fields on the forms because:
·
the TFR and TRU forms are primarily financial data collection forms, with numerical financial data comprising approximately 97 per cent of the data;
·
our existing data extraction tool, which enabled us to consider providing such a substantial amount of data without rejecting the request at the outset, was only written for the extraction of numerical data; and
·
the structure of the FIMS database, in which the data is held, requires each cell in the FIMS forms to be identified by a label in order for our existing extraction tools to be able to locate and export the data. Since we do not export freetext data for analysis, none of the freetext data held in the database has been labelled. There is a similar scenario with date fields, although there are only a very few of these held in the FIMS database.
We have considered the request to provide the freetext data under DE00000388788, and concluded that we would either have to:
·
ensure all the relevant data in the database was labelled, and rewrite our extraction tool to retrieve text and date values rather than numerical values; or
·
write a new version of the extraction tool that is capable of locating unlabelled data in the database.
Both processes would be time consuming, costly and unnecessary in the context of the Department’s day-to-day business.
In order to investigate the request made under DE00000388788, the Department has incurred the total additional cost of £200 (staff spent a total of eight hours of the MoJ guidance rate of £25).
Therefore, the total cost incurred on the two requests is £1,452.50, which makes this request exempt under section 12 of the FOIA.
Furthermore, the Department’s investigations to date and officials’ experience of the FIMS database indicate that the total cost of making the changes required to meet request DE00000388788 would exceed the appropriate limit on a standalone basis, irrespective of aggregation with DE00000381002.
I should explain that section 12(4)a of the FOI Act states that where two or more requests for information are made to a public authority by one person the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the total cost of complying with all of them.
If you have any queries about this letter, please contact me. Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.
If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request, you have the right to ask for an internal review. Internal review requests should be submitted within two months of the date of receipt of the response to your original letter and should be addressed to:
Freedom of Information Unit
Department of Health
Room 334b
Skipton House
SE1 6LH
Email:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xx.xxx.xxx.xx
If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint, you may apply directly to the Information Commissioner (ICO) for a decision. Generally, the ICO cannot make a decision unless you have exhausted the complaints procedure provided by the Department. The ICO can be contacted at:
The Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
SK9 5AF
Yours sincerely,
Woraphan Lagkam
Customer Service Centre
Department of Health