Cost of travel and accomodation for trips by the Metro Mayor and senior staff
Dear Liverpool City Region Combined Authority,
I would like to request a fully costed list of trips that have been taken by any member of your leadership team (including the Metro Mayor) in the last 5 years where either:
i) overnight accomodation has been used or
ii) where travel costs have exceeded £100.
For each trip, I would like to request an itemised spend profile on
- a) Accomodation (per night)
- b ) Food
- c) Travel
- d) Entertainment
I understand this may be difficult if more than one member of staff has attended a trip. So in those instances if you are unable to provide a breakdown by staff member then please would you kindly provide
- Overall total amounts for each of the above category for all staff for the trip
- Average amount per staff memebr
- The range of amounts (for example if one staff member has used a hotel room costing £80 per night and another has used a hotel room costing £220 then the range would be £80-220)
In reference to staff members this should also include any person from a partner organisation where the combined authority is picking up the bill for their expenses.
Yours faithfully,
James Humber-Smith
Dear James
Thank you for your recent correspondence, which has been received by the
Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and Merseytravel. Please use the
reference number 2520445 in any future correspondence on this matter.
For requests under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or Environmental
Information Regulations 2004 we will aim to provide a response within
twenty working days.
For requests under the Data Protection Act 2018 or General Data Protection
Regulation we will aim to respond within one month.
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Kind Regards
Andy Henderson
Senior Information Management Officer | 1 Mann Island, Liverpool, L3 1BP
Office: 0151 330 1679 |
Email: [email address]
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Dear James
Thank you for your recent request made under the Freedom of Information Act.
Officers have considered your enquiry, and, due to the way that the information is recorded, they have determined that responding to your questions in full would exceed the appropriate cost limit.
As defined by Section 12 of the Act, the cost limit for responding to a request under the Act for a local government body is set at £450, which is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour (totalling the equivalent of 18 hours’ work). When considering the cost of responding, we are able to take into account the time spent
a) determining whether the information is held;
b) locating the information;
c) retrieving the original record, and
d) extracting the requested data from the original record.
Should the cost exceed this appropriate limit, the authority has no obligation to fulfil the request.
By way of background, the Combined Authority’s current leadership team consists of seven posts, consisting of the Metro Mayor, the Chief Executive and the Executive Directors. The number and occupants of these roles have changed regularly over the past five years.
In order to fulfil your request, searches would have to be conducted of the individual journeys taken by every officer who fulfilled a role as part of the leadership team over the requested time period; checks would then need to be run on the separate systems that are used to book flights, trains, other travel and hotels and calculations made to determine whether the cost exceeded £100. Further records would then need to be checked to determine whether itemised records are held, and Payroll records would have to be consulted to determine any expenditure through expenses.
Officers have estimated that providing all the information provided even for a single year would exceed the 18 hours permitted.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, and to provide you with relevant advice and assistance to enable your enquiry to be answered in part, should you wish to reduce the scope of your enquiry (i.e. the cost of overnight expenditure for the leadership team over the past 12 months), we would be happy to reconsider it in line with the legislation.
If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request, you have the right to ask for an internal review, which should be addressed to:
Louise Outram
Chief Legal Officer / Monitoring Officer
Liverpool City Region Combined Authority
[email address]
If you are not content with the result of your internal review, you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner, whose address is
The Information Commissioner’s Office,
Wycliffe House,
Water Lane,
Wilmslow,
Cheshire SK9 5AF
www.ico.org.uk
Andy Henderson
Senior Information Management Officer | LCRCA | Mann Island, PO Box 1976, Liverpool, L69 3HN
Email: [Liverpool City Region Combined Authority request email]
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The information supplied continues to be protected by copyright. You are free to use it for your own purposes, including for private study and non-commercial research and for any other purpose authorised by an exception in current copyright law. Documents (except photographs) can also be used in the UK without requiring permission for the purposes of news reporting. Any other reuse, for example, commercial publication would require the permission of the copyright holder.
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