E-mails relating to franchising
Dear West of England Combined Authority,
I am writing to make a request for information under section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.
Please can you provide a copy of all e-mails sent to or from the mayor of the West of England (to be taken to include his office) since his election which include at least one of the following words: “franchising”, “franchise”, “franchises”, “franchised”.
If providing all matching e-mails since the mayor’s election would take the cost of complying with this request over the cost limit, you may restrict the request period to the last 12 months. If providing all matching e-mails even for the last 12 months would take the cost of complying with the request over the cost limit, you may restrict the request period to the period since the beginning of 2023. If you rely on this provision, you should explain why a longer request period would take the cost of complying with the request over the cost limit, noting that, per ICO guidance, any required redaction time cannot be included in the cost of complying with the request.
Yours faithfully,
Kenneth MacArthur
Dear Mr MacArthur
FOI0315
I acknowledge receipt of your Freedom of Information request. The Authority will respond formally in due course.
Many thanks
Democratic Services
Dear Mr MacArthur
The Authority believes that complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit as set out in Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 as an initial search has revealed several hundred such documents would hold those particular search terms even if the search was limited to 2023 with the cost of officer time of reviewing and retrieving this information having been taken in account.
Therefore the Authority can either charge for providing the information sought (we ask that you clarify the timeframe) or that you narrow or change the scope of your request.
Many thanks
Democratic Services
Dear West of England Combined Authority,
Thank you for your message.
I have two clarifying questions:
1) You refer to “documents” in your response, while I referred to e-mails in my request. Are you using the term “documents” to refer to e-mails, or has the request been taken to be wider than it actually was?
2) You mention officer time for reviewing and retrieving. Can you provide a high-level estimate of how you calculated the required officer time, and can you confirm that you have not included any required redaction time in that calculation, per ICO guidance?
While I would appreciate a response to the above two questions in the first instance, thereafter I would be open to having a Zoom/Teams call to discuss further if this is required, to save us both the time of an extended e-mail ping-pong. Let me know if you are open to this.
Yours faithfully,
Kenneth MacArthur
Dear Mr MacArthur
We have referred to the emails as 'documents' in our previous email.
As you are aware the provisions of Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 allows a public authority to refuse to comply with a request for information where the cost of compliance is estimated to exceed a set limit known as the appropriate limit. This limit is set at 18 hours work for most public authorities.
The Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can only take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:
determining whether the information is held;
locating the information, or a document containing it;
retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
extracting the information from a document containing it.
Having carried out an initial search using the terms and timeframes that you specified, the Authority is of the opinion that the above tasks would take well in excess of the time limit specified in Regulation 12. As per ICO guidance the Authority had stopped its work on this request when it realised that it was likely the appropriate limit would have been breached if it attempted compliance.
We have estimated the following:
Determining whether the information is held: 2 hours
Locating the information: 5 hours
Retrieving and extracting the information: at least 20 hours
This estimate is based on the officer time that would be needed to review and collate the large number of emails that have been identified as containing the search terms that you have specified.
As this is now outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act, the Authority can charge for the appropriate staff time that would be taken to provide this information. This staff time would include time spent on redaction. Please note that all the emails are likely to contain personal information that would need to be removed.
Many thanks
Democratic Services
Dear West of England Combined Authority,
Thank you for your message.
Per the suggestion at the end of my last message, would you be open to having a Zoom/Teams call to discuss this further? It would save us both the time of either an extended e-mail ping-pong, or my submitting further requests specifying various alternative time periods.
Yours faithfully,
Kenneth MacArthur
Dear Mr MacArthur
We can arrange an informal discussion if you so wish. If you can provide an alternative email address we can set something up.
Many thanks
Democratic Services
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Jon Baylis left an annotation ()
What a well worded FOI request.
Let's see if they try to weasel their way out of providing a response.