Redundancy and Dismissal proceedings in recent years.

For the avoidance of doubt I am currently serving as the elected Vice-President of the Cambridge branch of UCU
http://www.ucu.cam.ac.uk/ and obviously have an interest in the answers to these questions in that capacity.

Also regarding staff categories I am more interested in the details for staff funded from the University's own funds ("Chest funding") as opposed to those funded from external research grants and contracts with a fixed term.

Note that in previous FOI requests to the University asking for statistical/summary data, both from myself and others, the University has refused to provide the information claiming that it is "not required to create new information to comply with a Freedom of Information request". This position presumably is based on the MoJ guidance given here:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/guidance/foi-p...

If they attempt to do the same thing in response to your request here, you should be aware that both the ICO and the Information Tribunal have found against this position. In summary, the relevant Information Tribunal decision, as reported in paragraph 12 of the following ICO Decision Notice:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/d...

is as follows:

"In Johnson v the ICO and Ministry of Justice EA/2006/085 the Tribunal considered the extent to which a public authority would need to manipulate the information in order to comply with the request. It concluded that where the levels of 'skill and judgement' in collating information were minimal or where the substantive manipulation of the constituent information were not necessary to comply with a request, information should be considered to be held."

The Information Tribunal decision in full (Appeal Number: EA/2006/0085) is here:

http://www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/Do...

The ICO has been even more explicit in finding against this position. Paragraphs 27-8 of the following ICO Decision Notice:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/d...

state:

"27. The Commissioner acknowledges that public authorities will often
receive requests made under the Act for lists of information. In many
cases this will not be information which the public authority holds in list
form but the constituent data parts, instead, will be held in a database
or other disparate sources. A common response to such requests is
that the information is simply not held, because, as noted above, the
public authority is not in possession of a physical list, as requested. A
number of public authorities have further claimed that responding to
such a request would involve the creation of new information.

28. The Commissioner does not accept this position and instead is of the
view that where a database or other electronic source contains
recorded information identified in a request, the information is held, and
the public authority is under an obligation to provide it (unless it is
exempt). Further, the Commissioner considers that the actions
required to access the specified information constitute information
retrieval or extraction rather than the creation of new information,
because, simply, the information is held, albeit embedded within a
broader resource of data. As the Act provides a right of access to
recorded information, and such information is recorded, the difficulty of
the retrieval or extraction process is irrelevant to the question of
whether the information is held. However, the complexity of this
procedure, in terms of the time it would take to locate and extract the
requested information is clearly relevant to the consideration of costs
under the Fees Regulations."

Note that the ICO's position on this issue is more fully articulated in this ICO Decision Notice:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/d...

...which, additionally, has been upheld by the Information Tribunal on appeal:

http://www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/Do...

Given that the University has said that providing the information you want for the past 5 years would take one person more than 18 hours (and hence would cost too much), you could quite reasonably ask them to supply the information for the past x years where x is the largest number such that the request would not cost too much. (Of course, x might turn out to be so small as to be useless.)

In fact, according to the guidance issued by the Information Commissioner ("Using the Fees Regulations") at:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/l...

they should have done this as a matter of course:

"Where an authority refuses a request because the appropriate limit has been exceeded, it should, bearing in mind the duty under section 16 of the FOIA to advise and assist an applicant, provide information on how the estimate has been arrived at and provide advice to the applicant as to how the request could be refined or limited to come within the cost limit."

Thus, arguably the University is failing to do its duty under Section 16 of the FOIA. It would make sense to ask them to review their handling of this request in light of the Information Commissioner's guidance above.

I observe that the University's response does not provide any information on how it arrived at its estimate [that it would cost too much to provide the requested information]. Typically, authorities explaining how they arrived at such an estimate would provide approximate figures for the likely number of files that would need to be searched and the length of time it would take to locate and search each file for the relevant information. This allows the requester to judge for themselves whether this estimate is a reasonable one.

Thus arguably the University has still not complied with Section 16 of the FOIA and the requester should consider complaining about the handling of this request.

Furthermore, the University's response includes the following statement: "I understand that the Director of HR confers regularly with senior officers in the Division in order to monitor compliance with the University's statutory obligations, including under the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992." If any minutes or notes are taken of/at these regular communications, then they might provide the figures on redundancy that the requester is after. The request should consider asking for such notes, minutes, etc., or at least the relevant portions of them. It would be interesting to know whether such minutes, notes, etc. exist, since if they don't this would be another example of the University's apparently poor record keeping with respect to the routine business of the University.

I would have thought it would be appriopriate for the external members of the University Council to take an interest in the various matters raised by this request if it was brought to their attention.

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/press/dp...