Contingent Labour ONE call off contracts

The request was successful.

Dear Sirs

Please can you provide under the Freedom of Information Act a copy of any Call Off Contracts entered into by your organisation with Capita Business Services Limited, Brook Street (UK) Limited and Hays Specialist Recruitment Limited for the provision of services under the Contingent Labour ONE framework (RM960).

For the avoidance of doubt, I am interested in any master agreements signed with Capita, Brook Street and Hays and not agreements for the provision of individual contractors.

To avoid any concerns about Data Protection, please feel free to redact the Contact Reference, Account Manager and the Key Personnel from section 3.1.

I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Yours faithfully

Paul Davies

Do Not Reply,

1 Attachment

Please find attached the Department's response to your recent FOI request.

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Dear Department of Health,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Department of Health's handling of my FOI request 'Contingent Labour ONE call off contracts'.

I asked for copies of specific call off contracts between the Department and the three suppliers on the Contingent Labour ONE framework agreement, namely Capita Business Services Limited, Brook
Street (UK) Limited and Hays Specialist Recruitment Limited. This request was refused by you stating that the information was reasonably accessible to me, and claiming a Section 21 exemption. They stated that contracts information relating to the Department could be found at www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Search or https://data.gov.uk/data/contracts-finde....

As you will no doubt be aware, Contracts Finder is a repository used across the public sector, and contains many thousands of documents. The search facility on Contracts Finder is rudimentary and hence finding three specific contracts on this huge site is virtually impossible. In Christopher Ames v Information Commissioner and the Cabinet Office (EA/2007/0110, 24 April 2008), the applicant sought specific information from the Cabinet Office and was advised that this was available on a similar huge web site and hence the CO claimed a s21 exemption. The Information Tribunal found that s21 was not appropriate in such a case, as this did not accord with the aim of the exemption that the information should be reasonably accessible. The Information Commissioner's guidance on s21 states that even if information may be published elsewhere, it is only reasonably accessible if you know that the applicant has already found the information or if you are "able to provide the applicant with precise directions to the information so that it can be found without difficulty" and go on to state that "when applying section 21 in this context, the key point is that the authority must be able to provide directions to the information."

Merely stating that the information is somewhere on Contracts Finder clearly does not satisfy this. Please therefore can you either respond to the FOI request and send me the call off contracts or provide me with the precise URLs to where the contracts can be found on Contracts Finder.

In responding to a similar request made by me, I should like to point out that HM Treasury, whilst also claiming a s21 exemption, was justified in doing so as it gave specific links to data.gov.uk/data/contracts-finder-archive/contract/xxxxxx for the appropriate contracts. If you are prepared to give me similar specific links to where I can find your contracts, that will suffice; merely stating they are somewhere on Contracts Finder is not sufficient to engage s21.

I should like to point out that the Information Commissioner considers that "a reasonable time for completing an internal review is 20 working days from the date of the request for review". This internal review is very straightforward - you simply need to ascertain whether it is easy to find the information on Contracts Finder and if not instruct your team to find the contracts. I would therefore hope that you would be able to meet the original date for the FOI response of 18/7/17, or at the very latest 20 days from today.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/c...

Yours faithfully,

Paul Davies

FreedomofInformation,

Dear Mr Davies,

 

Thank you for your email.

 

I have discussed your FOI request (1087868) with the team that has policy
responsibility for your request.

 

I understand the dirct URL links to the information you requested are as
follows:

 

Capita -
https://data.gov.uk/data/contracts-finde...

Brook Street -
https://data.gov.uk/data/contracts-finde...

Hays -
https://data.gov.uk/data/contracts-finde...

 

I hope this is helpful for you.

 

I would grateful if you could please confirm if you are now happy to
withdraw your request for an internal review into the handling of FOI
1087868?  Or would you still like to pursue your request for an internal
review?

 

Kind regards,

Harish

Harish Sehdev

Deputy Head of Freedom of Information

Department of Health, Room G18, Richmond House,

79 Whitehall, SW1A 2NS

Follow us on Twitter @DHgovuk

 

 

 

 

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Dear Harish

Thanks for looking into this, but unfortunately those are not the call off contracts entered into by the Department of Health - these are the generic blank ones. If you click into any of those, you will see that they have no specific details of the Department, when your specific call off contract starts and finishes etc.

Please can you find the specific call off contracts entered into by the Department with the three suppliers. I understand that you would not be able to access Contingent Labour ONE services if you had not signed these so they must be somewhere in the system.

If you are able and willing to find and send these contracts in the next couple of weeks, I am happy for you to treat this as just responding to the original FOI request rather than having to go through your Internal Review process.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Davies

FreedomofInformation,

Dear Mr Davies,

Thank you for your email, which I have accepted as a request for an internal review.

I will endeavour to complete the review and get back to you within 20 working days, in this case by 10 August.

Thanks,
Harish

Harish Sehdev
Deputy Head of Freedom of Information
Department of Health, Room G18, Richmond House,
79 Whitehall, SW1A 2NS
Follow us on Twitter @DHgovuk

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FreedomofInformation,

3 Attachments

Dear Mr Davies,

I would like to apologise for the length of time it has taken to carry out the Internal Review of FOI-1087868.

The review is now complete. Please see the attached letter for the outcome.

Kind regards,
James

James Shewbridge
Freedom of Information Team
Department of Health and Social Care
39 Victoria St
London SW1H 0EU

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