T’
Corporate Services
020 7035 4848
2 Marsham Street
(switchboard)
London SW1P 4DF
www.homeoffice.gov.uk
Ms Natasha Phillips
Via e-mail
: request-492536-
xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
18 July 2018
Freedom of Information request (our reference: 49120)
Dear Ms Phillips,
Thank you for your e-mails dated 21 June 2018 in which you requested information on the
financial interest of Home Office staff. Your request has been handled as a request for
information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.
Your full request was as follows:
Please could you offer a breakdown of the financial interests in children's homes or
fostering agencies, whether private or public, held by every member of the Home
Office.
Please could you offer a breakdown of the financial interests in adoption agencies,
whether private or public, held by every member of the Home Office.
Your FOI request has been amalgamated for the purposes of cost under section12 (4).
Under section 12 of the Act, the Home Office is not obliged to comply with an information
request where to do so would exceed the cost limit.
We have estimated that the cost of meeting your request would exceed the cost limit of
£600 specified in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and
Fees) Regulations 2004. We are therefore unable to comply with it.
To establish conclusively whether the Home Office holds all such information would
exceed the appropriate limit under section 12(2) of the FOIA. The £600 limit is based on
work being carried out at a rate of £25 per hour, which equates to 24 hours of work per
request. The cost of locating, retrieving and extracting information and preparing the
response can be included in the costs for these purposes. The costs do not include
considering whether any information is exempt from disclosure, overheads such as
heating or lighting, or items such as photocopying or postage.
All Senior Civil Servants (SCS) within the Home Office are required to make a yearly
declaration of their financial interests. This information is collated and held centrally.
However, SCS only make a small proportion of members of Home Office staff, and any
registration of financial interests for members of staff below Civil Service Grade 5, are
made locally and on an ad-hoc basis. To obtain the financial interests of members of staff
within the Home Office would require a manual search of all the units and within excess of
30,000 members of staff this would clearly breach the cost limit a described above.
You may wish to refine your request to just SCS members of staff, and if so would you be
able to clarify what you would like in the
‘breakdown’ of these financial interests. However,
please bear in mind that while there are only 200+ SCS in the Home Office, to determine
whether the SCS benefits financially from any of these interests and if is it associated with
a Children’s Home, Fostering or adoption Agencies would require further investigation and
may take this refined request over the cost limit.
In addition, please find link below outlining the published information on Home Office
ministerial interests.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-ministers-interests
If you are dissatisfied with this response you may request an independent internal review
of our handling of your request by submitting a complaint within two months to the address
below, quoting reference 49120. If you ask for an internal review, it would be helpful if you
could say why you are dissatisfied with the response.
Information Access Team
Home Office
3rd Floor, Peel Building
2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF
e-mail
: xxxx.xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xxx.xx
As part of any internal review the Department's handling of your information request will be
reassessed by staff who were not involved in providing you with this response. If you
remain dissatisfied after this internal review, you would have a right of complaint to the
Information Commissioner as established by section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act.
Yours sincerely
Andy Woodgate HR, Capabilities & Resources
Annex A
If you remain dissatisfied after an internal review, you would have a right of complaint to
the Information Commissioner as established by section 50 of the Freedom of Information
Act.
The Information Commissioner
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire SK9 5AF