Home Office
2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF
xxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx
www.homeoffice.gov.uk
Dr Emma L Briant
FOI: 58731
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
3 June 2020
Dear Emma
Thank you for your email dated 12 May 2020, in which you ask;
to see any correspondence between Director General OSCT Tom Hurd and Nigel Oakes, Head of
the Behavioral Dynamics Institute (BDI) and Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL).
Your request has been handled as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act
2000 (FOIA).
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 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. The cost limit would be exceeded by the cost of assessing
whether the information is held.
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 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.
If you refine your request, so that it is more likely to fall under the cost limit, we will consider it again.
You can possibly refine your request by providing a time period or requesting information on a
specific topic. Please note that if you simply break your request down into a series of similar smaller
requests, we might still decline to answer it if the total cost exceeds £600.
Even if a revised request were to fall within the cost limit, it is possible that other exemptions in the
Act might apply.
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
xxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx, quoting reference 58731. If you ask for an internal review, it would
be helpful if you could say why you are dissatisfied with the response.
As part of any internal review the Department's handling of your information request would be
reassessed by staff who were not involved in providing you with this response. If you were to remain
dissatisfied after an internal review, you would have a right of complaint to the Information
Commissioner as established by section 50 of the FOIA.
Yours sincerely
Freedom of Information
Home Office
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