Public cost of Royal Family and accomodation

Our Ref: 131932

Dear Mr Sittampalam,

Thank you for your message of 22^nd December 2009 requesting information
on the cost of the Royal Family

I am dealing with your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000
(`the Act')[and EIR?]. The Act gives you the right to:

* know whether we hold the information specified in your request and, if
that is the case,
* to have that information communicated to you, subject to the
provisions of the Act.

You have asked for the following information:

Please disclose, under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act or the
Environmental Information Regulations as appropriate, all the
correspondence since 28 June 2004 between the government and Buckingham
Palace and Clarence House in respect of the public cost of the Royal
Family and their accommodation.

Cost Limit

Section 12 of the Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse
requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed
the appropriate limit, which for central government is set at £600. This
represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3.5 working days in
determining whether the department holds the information, locating,
retrieving and extracting the information.

In this case there has been a substantial amount of correspondence with
the Palace and Clarence House in the period between 28^th June 2004 and
22^nd December 2009. The task of identifying all of the possibly relevant
correspondence, searching through it all in order to identify if it is
within scope, and extracting the required information, would be vastly in
excess of the cost limit provided.

If you would like further information regarding the cost limit and how it
is applied please refer to the Office of Public Sector Information Website
using the link below.
[1]http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2004/2004324...

If you could narrow your request so that we might be able to assist you
within the cost limit, I have attached some links which I hope will be of
interest to you with regards to the cost of the Royal Family. If after
looking through the below material you feel there is something more
specific you would like information on then we would be happy to assist
you wherever we can.

The Royal Household's website and copies of annual financial statements
are available at:
[2]http://www.royal.gov.uk/TheRoyalHousehol...

The recent National Audit Office report:
[3]http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0809/...

The subsequent Public Accounts Committee report:
[4]http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa...

The Government response:
[5]http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/doc...

If you would like help in clarifying your request, or if I can be of any
further assistance, then please do not hesitate to contact me.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen Bell
Freedom of Information Team
Public Engagement and Recognition Unit
Tel: 0207 211 2304

Complaints and comments

As is customary in our replies, I would like to explain that if you are
dissatisfied with any aspect of our response to your request for
information and/or wish to appeal against information being withheld from
you please send full details within two calendar months of the date of
this letter to:

FOI Team
Public Engagement and Recognition Unit
Department for Culture Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street, London,
SW1Y 5DH

You have the right to ask the Information Commissioner (ICO) to
investigate any aspect of your complaint. Please note that the ICO is
likely to expect internal complaints procedures to have been exhausted
before beginning his investigation.

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REF: 134201

Dear Mr Sittampalam

Re: Request for internal review - public cost of Royal family and
accommodation

Following your request for internal review, I wanted to quickly take this
opportunity to explain to you the reasons for the application of the cost
limit before proceeding further with the review process.

Background

I thought it would also be useful if I explain the background to the case
that you have referred to. The original request was submitted to DCMS on
29 June 2006, and DCMS responded to the applicant on 17 November 2006.
This response cited the exemptions that we believed were applicable under
the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The exemptions applied were sections
21, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, and 43 of the Act.

On 17 November 2006 a request for internal review was submitted to DCMS,
and the review concluded on 30 January 2007, upholding the decision and
exempting the disclosure of information. The case was then subsequently
referred to the Information Commissioner on 16 March 2007, and Decision
Notice FS50154684 was issued on 15 December 2009.

On 13 January 2010 DCMS appealed the decision to the Tribunal (Information
Rights), and consequently no information has to date been released into
the public domain.

Cost Limit

In the case described above, as you rightly stated, the request covered
the two year period between June 2004 and June 2006, and there was a large
amount of information returned from our searches. Indeed in hindsight
there could have been an argument for applying the cost limit in that
case. As the case is being appealed to the Tribunal it means that it will
not be a simple matter of copying all released information to you for the
2004-06 period, but will depend on the outcome of the Tribunal.

In the following period covered by your request, a large amount of
information has been stored on our electronic databases which could
possibly be considered to be within the scope of your request. A quick
search on one of databases for terms such as `Royal Household' and `Royal
Family' turned up over 8000 documents. This is without going to
individual employees to search their own paper files and relevant emails
which may not be on the databases, but which may be within the scope of
your request. Not all of these documents will be relevant, but we believe
that searching and analysing all of this information to decide whether it
is within the scope of your request, and then extracting the relevant
information, would put us in excess of the cost limit provided under the
Act. Unfortunately there is not one specific file or folder where this
information will currently be stored.

Owing to this I suggested in my previous response to you that there is a
large amount of information already available to the public since 2006
which would be relevant to your request, and I have copied the relevant
links again below for ease of reference. Please note that information
concerning the cost of the Royal Household, including studies conducted by
the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee in recent
years is available from the attached links. If you have a specific FOI
request relating to any of the information available to you there, then we
would be pleased to assist you further where we can.

The Royal Household's website and copies of annual financial statements
are available at:
[1]http://www.royal.gov.uk/TheRoyalHousehol...

The recent National Audit Office report:
[2]http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0809/...

The subsequent Public Accounts Committee report:
[3]http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa...

The Government response:
[4]http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/doc...

Also please note that as we are currently appealing the Information
Commissioner's decision at Tribunal, it is likely that DCMS would form a
similar view on further requests for the same information until the
resolution of the current case. If you would like we will note your
interest and will contact you again following the eventual outcome of the
case.

Late Response

You also requested that we review the length of time taken to respond to
your request as you considered that it was not "prompt". I understand
your frustration, but your request came to us on 22^nd December 2009 when
many of the staff involved in the previous case were away and it was also
being handled alongside a number of other cases. Equally we did not want
to respond to you before DCMS had taken the opportunity to decide whether
or not to appeal the case to the Information Tribunal, and eventually
responded 3 working days after our appeal was lodged. If we had not
appealed then we could have provided you with the information we would
have been releasing under that request, and cited the cost limit for the
remainder of the period covered by your request.

Under the Freedom of Information Act we are required to respond within 20
working days, which you accept we did. Previous cases which have been to
the Information Commissioner with a similar argument to the one you
outline have been rejected as it is understood that we do have 20 working
days to respond. In saying that we do believe it is best practise to
respond as soon as possible if the opportunity presents itself.

If you have any further questions regarding any of the above, or would
like to continue with your request for internal review please let me know.

Yours Sincerely,

Stephen Bell
Freedom of Information Team
DCMS
Tel: 0207 211 2304

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Dear Mr Sittampalam,

Instances where complaints have been made with regards to the length of time taken to respond, and where the length of time in question is less than 20 working days, the Commissioner normally rejects the complaint before reaching the stage of writing a decision notice. In the few instances involving DCMS where a similar complaint has been made, the argument concerning a prompt reply were rejected, but arguments regarding application of the public interest test would have been taken forward into consideration if they were made.

The Commissioner will not necessarily make decision notices on all cases, and normally only where there is a substantive issue which needs to be resolved. If you would like more information on this I would advise contacting the ICO directly who I am sure would be happy to help.

Regards,

Stephen Bell
Freedom of Information Team
DCMS
Tel: 0207 211 2304

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