I.t suppliers/costs

Dear James

Thank you for your request dated 7th August requesting information about
I.t suppliers/costs.

Your request is being dealt with under the terms of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000 and will be answered within twenty working days.

If you have any queries about this request do not hesitate to contact
me. Please remember to quote the reference number above in any future
communications.

Regards, Nicola

Nicola Lowe

FOI/Datix Administrator

Corporate Affairs Directorate

NHS Manchester

2nd Floor

Parkway Business Centre

Princess Road

Manchester

M14 7LU

0161 765 4162

Tuesday-Friday

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Dear Mr Connely

I am emailing to respond to your FOI request to NHS Manchester, which we received on August 7 2009.

Your request was as follows:

"I would like to request a complete list of suppliers/contractors and consultants that have been used over the past year when procuring I.T hardware and the total spend on I.T hardware during the past year.

Also could you break this hardware spend down to show what brand servers, networking and desktop hardware were purchased with a spend amount in each segment.

I would also like to request full details of the person(s) who conduct the i.t purchasing there."

I would first like to apologise for the fact that we have not responded to your request until now. I recently took over responsibility for the Information Governance team, and as part of a review of previous cases, we found that the need to provide a final response to your request had apparently been overlooked. The Trust has increased the number of permanent staff dealing with FOI requests, and I believe that the work we are doing should prevent such a problem from occuring again.

Regrettably, in this instance, I am nevertheless refusing to respond to your request on the basis that I estimate that to find, collate and provide all of the information you have requested would exceed the appropriate limit set out in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. The Regulations state that for any FOI request, the appropriate cost limit is £450, calculated at a rate of £25 an hour to find, extract, collate and provide information that has been requested.

The Trust does not currently collate and analyse purchases of IT equipment in the way that you have described, and is not required to do so for any statutory or internal purpose. Therefore, the information you have requested is held in individual records of approximately 3000 relevant transactions. Each transaction does not detail whether the item is a servers, networking equipment or desktop hardware - frequently it will show a product name and serial or reference number.

In order to collate a complete list of suppliers with a breakdown of the types of equipment, we would need to extract the data from our ledger system, and then format the information so that a member of staff could check each transaction to check what the item was who supplied it and what the cost was in order to extract the data. We are not aware of any automatic or electronic search which would extract the information from our systems - each item would need to be looked at individually.

On the basis that there are approximately 3000 transactions, even if checking each record took no more than 1 minutes, it would take 50 hours to check them all. Although it is possible that it might take longer than 1 minute to check each record, I estimate that it would therefore take at least 50 hours to answer your request, not including the time taken to extract and format the data from the ledger, and the time taken to calculate and check the totals your request would require. On this basis, I believe that answering your request would exceed the £450 appropriate limit set out in the regulations.

I can confirm that all of our purchases go through the OGC framework. Most of our server purchases are of CISCO, HP and Compaq, and a great number of purchases are made from Misco.

The main contractors we use are Redstone, Computacenter, Microsoft, 2e2, Max20, Venn Group and Computer Futures.

The individual responsible for IT purchases is Gary Pomfret and he can be contacted at 0161 765 4000.

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 receipt of our response and sent to [NHS Manchester request email]

If you are unhappy with the outcome of an internal review you have the right to ask the Information Commissioner to consider the handling of your request. They can be contacted through the following hyperlink https://www.ico.gov.uk/Global/contact_us...

Regards

Tim Turner

Information Governance Manager
Manchester Primary Care Trust
2nd floor
Parkway 3
Parkway Business Centre
Princess Road
Manchester, M14 7LU

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