Charities which have received funding/payments/donations/fees/expenses.

Dear Mr Rossiter
Thank you for your request for information about payments made to
charitable organisations.
As we told you in our reply to a previous request, KCC does not have a
specific account code for payments made to charitable organisations, nor
is there any kind of flag or marker which distinguishes one type or
category of payee from another, either of which would aid the
extrapolation of the data required to satisfy your request. Therefore to
ascertain if any payments have been made by KCC to charities would involve
either:-

(a) Interrogating our financial database by putting in the name of an
individual charity to see if any payments have been made to it for the
period in question (as we did for your subsequent request regarding
payments made to Common Purpose). Please note that KCC does not hold a
list of registered charities, so we would have to obtain this information
in the first instance and even if we did obtain a list, we understand that
there are over 180,000 registered charities in the UK so to perform a
search 180,000 times would certainly exceed the appropriate limit of £450
equivalent to 18 hours @ £25 per hour.

Or
(b) Producing a list of all organisations that have been paid money by KCC
since 2005. However, because there have been hundreds of thousands of
transactions in this period of time, we would not be able to generate a
single report - it would be too large for our financial database's
capabilities - and we would have to produce a monthly report sorted by
name of payee. The generation of 51 reports would probably exceed the
appropriate limit on its own before any analysis was done, but even if it
didn't, simply looking through the list of payees for each of the 51
months and establishing which ones were registered charities (only
well-known charities would be immediately obvious) certainly would then
exceed the appropriate limit.

Therefore, under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the
Council is not obliged to comply with your request. However, to reiterate
our previous offer, we can quite easily generate a report on payments made
to a specific organisation or individual for a given period of time (e.g.:
Common Purpose) so if there was another charity or trust you are
interested in, please let us know and we will be happy to revisit your
request.

If you are unhappy with this response, and believe KCC has not complied
with legislation, please ask for a review by following our complaints
process; details can be found at this link
[1]http://www.kent.gov.uk/your_council/have...
on our website. Please quote reference FOI/10/0297.

If you still remain dissatisfied following an internal review, you can
appeal to the Information Commissioner, who oversees compliance with the
Freedom of Information Act 2000. Details of what you need to do, should
you wish to pursue this course of action, are available from the
Information Commissioner's website
[2]http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints/freedom...

Best regards

Caroline Dodge
Corporate Access to Information Coordinator, Chief Executive's Department
Kent County Council, Legal & Democratic Services, Room B.48, Sessions
House, County Hall, Maidstone. ME14 1XQ.
Tel: 01622 221652 - Fax: 01622 696075
[3]http://www.kent.gov.uk/your_council/have...

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