REF: TKATFOI082102
Refusal Notice – Section 12 Freedom of Information Act 2000
Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 allows a public authority to
refuse a request if the cost of providing the information to the applicant would
exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by the Freedom of Information and
Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004:
“12 Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
(1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request
for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the
request would exceed the appropriate limit”.
The Regulations provide that the appropriate limit to be applied to requests
received by public authorities is £450. In estimating the cost of complying
with a request for information, an authority can only take into account any
reasonable costs incurred in:
“(a) determining whether it holds the information,
(b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the
information,
(c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the
information, and
(d) extracting the information from a document containing it”.
For the purposes of the estimate the costs of performing these activities
should be estimated at a rate of £25 per person, per hour.
We believe that it would take a considerable amount of time to extract and collate
the information requested. Some of the information you have requested would be
held on our central system and some at our individual academies, currently summing
some 45 establishments. Each academy would have to assign a staff member to
search records not held on the central system for the information going back several
years. As per your request, this will require first ascertaining if the document falls
into the scope of your request, i.e. a facilities management contract, then
interrogating the document for the remainder of the information you require.
If each staff member took only an hour to collate the data, the costs would still
exceed £1000, more than double the appropriate limit. Considering the request
itself, we do not believe we would be able to provide you with any meaningful
information within the appropriate limit.
As a result, we are refusing parts of your request under section 12 of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000