Dear Mr Maclean

I write in connection with your request for information which was received by Sussex Police on 19 June.

A list of individual records still held by Sussex Police of expenditure on the services of Common Purpose is attached, together with copies of invoices for three of the items.

Any such information prior to 2001 is not now held, and was not held at the time of your request, as all individual finance records are routinely destroyed on that timescale, so that it is not possible from our records to say whether any such expenditure was incurred before that date.

The cost of providing you with copies of the invoices for the other eleven items listed, if still held, is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the “appropriate level” as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. Taking into account the 7 hours already required to research your request it is estimated that it would cost in excess of 18 staff working hours to fully comply.

This is because (a) it is believed that invoices for the first nine payments listed may be held in a basement store at Brighton Police Station, which contains thousands of finance and administrative records going back several years. It has never been necessary to anyone to access them before now, and in order to do so we estimate that two members of staff would be required to move and search the boxes for up to a day, and (b) it is believed that the invoice for the tenth item on the list will be held in our headquarters Finance Department in a micro-fiched format, amongst tens of thousands of such documents, and other similar ones to which, again no access has ever yet been necessary. It is estimated that it would take one member of staff up to a day to search these records.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for the information unsupplied. We can if you wish consider a limited search within the remaining cost limit to see what can be found at either or both of the venues mentioned above. I cannot at this stage say how much could be searched within the limit or how long it would take as in both cases staff would need to be taken off other work.

Yours sincerely

T Mahony

Freedom of Information Disclosure Officer

To; Mr R Maclean

By; Email

Right of Appeal

Sussex Police provides you the right to request a re-examination of your case under its review procedure. If you decide to request such a review and having followed Sussex Police's full process you are still dissatisfied, then you have the right to direct your comments to the Information Commissioner who will give it consideration.

Copyright

The Sussex Police in complying with their statutory duty under sections 1 and 11 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to release the enclosed information will not breach the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. However, the rights of the copyright owner of the enclosed information will continue to be protected by law.  Applications for the copyright owner's written permission to reproduce any part of the attached information should be addressed to Chief Constable, Sussex Police Headquarters, Malling House, Church Lane, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 2DZ.