Defence Business Services
Secretariat Team
Room 6303
Tomlinson House
Norcross
Thornton-Cleveleys
Lancashire
FY5 3WP
Ref: FOI2019/05138
E-mail: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxx.xxx.xx
Mr Stephen Delahunty
Email: request-571915-
xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
30 May 2019
Dear Mr Delahunty,
Thank you for your email of 30 April 2019 to the Ministry of Defence (MOD) requesting the
following information:
“Freedom of Information request -PR spending 2019/20
For the above can you state how many public relations and marketing staff earn over
£50,000 per year, and how many earn over £100,000.”
I am treating your correspondence as a request for information under the Freedom of
Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
A search for the information has now been completed within the Ministry of Defence (MOD),
and I can confirm that some information in scope of your request is held. However, I have
to advise you that we will not be able to answer your request without exceeding the
appropriate cost limit.
Section 12 of the FOI 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 it, retrieving it and extracting it.
It may be helpful if I explain, that there is no centrally held record of staff currently employed
in public relations and marketing. Staff undertaking such functions are spread wide across
the Department and job roles are not listed or recorded as just “public relations marketing”.
MOD civilian roles are recorded by grades e.g. Executive Officer, Higher Executive Officer,
and a wide variety of job grades within the MOD are not classified by functions. To
ascertain which staff are undertaking public relations and marketing functions would
require asking all staff across the whole MOD. For example, there are around 50,000
civilian staff alone working in the MOD, and in excess of 180,000 Armed Forces Personnel
some of whom would be responsible for public relations and marketing in some form or
other. To undertake such an exercise would exceed the cost limit stated above.
Under Section 16 of the Act (Advice and Assistance), you may wish to narrow the
scope of your request. For example, you may wish to name a specific area of the MOD. It
would also be helpful if you could quantify what exactly you mean by public relations and
marketing staff in order to help identify what is in scope. Please be aware exemptions may
still apply even after refinement.
If you have any queries regarding the content of this letter, please contact this office in the
first instance.
If you wish to complain about the handling of your request, or the content of this response,
you can request an independent internal review by contacting the Information Rights
Compliance team, Ground Floor, MOD Main Building, Whitehall, SW1A 2HB (e-mail CIO-
xxxxxx@xxx.xxx.xx). Please note that any request for an internal review should be made
within 40 working days of the date of this response.
If you remain dissatisfied following an internal review, you may raise your complaint directly
to the Information Commissioner under the provisions of Section 50 of the Freedom of
Information Act. Please note that the Information Commissioner will not normally investigate
your case until the MOD internal review process has been completed. The Information
Commissioner can be contacted at: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House,
Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Further details of the role and powers of the
Information Commissioner can be found on the Commissioner's website at
https://ico.org.uk/.
Yours sincerely,
Dominic Haydn-Braithwaite
Defence Business Services (Secretariat)