Dear Ms Davis,

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 (FOIA) - INFORMATION REQUEST

The City of London (CoL) acknowledges receipt of your request for
information of 8 July 2010. Public authorities are required to respond to
requests within the statutory timescale of 20 working days beginning from
the first working day after they receive a request. The Act does not
always require public authorities to disclose the information which they
hold.

The FOIA applies to the CoL as a local authority, police authority and
port health authority. The CoL is the local authority for the "Square
Mile", ie the historic City of London, and not for London as a whole.
Please see the following link to a map on the CoL's website, which shows
the local authority area covered:

[1]www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/maps/boundary_map.htm.

Yours sincerely,

Information Officer
City of London
Tel: 020-7332 1209
[2]www.cityoflondon.gov.uk

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Dear Ms Davis,

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 (FOIA) - INFORMATION REQUEST

Following your request of 8 July 2010, and our acknowledgement of 9 July
2010, the City of London (CoL) responds as follows.

In your request you asked for:

"(a) addresses and rateable values of empty Commercial properties with a
current rateable value greater than £50,000 that are within Common
Council of the City of London area;

(b) the names and addresses of the owners of those properties referred to
in (a)"

This response constitutes a Refusal Notice under Section 17 of the FOIA.
The CoL estimates that the work required to locate and extract the
information you have requested would take more than provided for in the
Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulations 2004, exceeding the cost ceiling, called (as you may know) the
'appropriate limit', of £450, representing 18 hours work by one person
equivalent at the statutory chargeable rate of £25 an hour. We
conservatively estimate that the task would take 109 hours which, in
accordance with the rate allowed to be charged under the Regulations, is
the equivalent of £2,725 in cost terms. We do not hold any lists of empty
properties within specific ranges of rateable values and the only lists we
can produce from our rating records do not contain rateable values. This
means that the only way we could provide the information you have
requested is by looking up the details of every property manually. As
there are over 3,000 empty properties, to fulfil the task would, as
indicated, considerably exceed the appropriate limit. In estimating the
time it would take to comply with a request, public authorities are
permitted to take into account the time it would take to locate and
retrieve the requested information and to extract it from information
which has not been requested. Public authorities are not required to
comply with requests which it is estimated may exceed the appropriate
limit. Where they do comply, they are allowed to charge the full permitted
cost. For resource reasons, it is the practice of the CoL not to comply
with requests which exceed the appropriate limit.

In accordance with best practice guidance as described in the Information
Commissioner's decision notice (Ref: FS 50203140), after applying the
appropriate limit a public authority is required to provide advice and
assistance, in so far as is possible, as to ways in which an applicant
could reduce his/her request so that it may fall within the appropriate
limit. We would be able, within the limit, to supply you with a list of
all empty properties subject to non-domestic rates in the City. This list
would not contain any rateable values but would simply be of all empty
rateable properties at the date the list is produced.

If you would like this information, please let us know. This would
constitute a new request under the FOIA.

Please note that, in any revised request, should you wish to include empty
properties owned by individuals, we would have to consider the application
of the FOIA Section 31(1)(a) exemption ('prejudice [to] the prevention or
detection of crime'), in line with the guidance provided by the
Information Tribunal Appeal Decision EA/2006/0060&0066 (Decision
promulgated 10 May 2007), where the exclusion of such properties from
disclosure was upheld.

Finally, please note that, for rating purposes, the owners are the
ratepayers, i.e. persons entitled to possession. We do not hold records of
registered owners as such but only of those liable to pay non-domestic
rates.

We hope that this response is of assistance.

If you wish to make a complaint about the way the CoL has managed your
enquiry under the FOIA, please make your complaint in writing to email
address: [email address]. For a link to the CoL's FOI
complaints procedure, please visit the following page:
[1]www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Feedback, at the end of which is located the
FOI complaints procedure. If, having used the CoL's FOI Complaints
Procedure, you are still dissatisfied, you may request the Information
Commissioner to investigate. Please contact: Information Commissioner,
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF. Tel: (01625)
545700. Website: [2]http://www.ico.gov.uk/.

The FOIA applies to the City of London as a local authority, police
authority and port health authority.

The City of London holds the copyright in this email. The supply of it
does not give a right to re-use it in a way that would infringe that
copyright, for example, by making copies, publishing and issuing copies to
the public or to any other person. Brief extracts of any of the material
may be reproduced under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988 (sections 29 and 30) for the purposes of
research for non-commercial purposes, private study, criticism, review and
news reporting, subject to an acknowledgement of the copyright owner.

Yours sincerely,

Revenue Collection Group
City of London
Tel 020 7332 1387
[3]www.cityoflondon.gov.uk

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