Number of nurseries with planning permission conditions for number of children in the garden.

Bristol City Council did not have the information requested.

Dear Bristol City Council,

Please could you provide me with the number of childcare facilities in Bristol (Childminder, Nursery, Pre School, Creche, Childcare on Domestic Premises etc) that have planning permission from Bristol City Council or from the Planning Inspectorate with a condition attached to the permission to control the number of children at play in the garden.

For example, Planning Application Ref 02/01452/F granted a change of use from residential to nursery with a condition that no more than 8 children should be permitted in the garden at anyone time.

I only require the number of childcare facilities that have such a condition attached. I do not necessarily need to know specifics about the application if this would prove to be to time consuming for you.

But if possible I would like the planning application number and the number of children that are currently permitted in the garden.

Yours faithfully,

Hayley Evans

Freedom of Information, Bristol City Council

Thank you for your request for information. You should expect to receive a
response within the 20 day working limit.

Dear Bristol City Council,

Is there an update for this please?

Yours faithfully,

Hayley

Freedom of Information, Bristol City Council

Dear Hayley

Your email has been forwarded on for a response to the officer assigned to reply to your request for information.

Regards

Freedom Of Information team

show quoted sections

Steve Knight, Bristol City Council

1 Attachment

Dear Hayley Evans,

 

Thank you for your freedom of information request dated 29 April 2014.

 

Please could you provide me with the number of childcare facilities in
Bristol (Childminder, Nursery, Pre School, Creche, Childcare on Domestic
Premises etc) that have planning permission from Bristol City Council or
from the Planning Inspectorate with a condition attached to the permission
to control the number of children at play in the garden.

For example, Planning Application Ref 02/01452/F granted a change of use
from residential to nursery with a condition that no more than 8 children
should be permitted in the garden at anyone time.

I only require the number of childcare facilities that have such a
condition attached. I do not necessarily need to know specifics about the
application if this would prove to be to time consuming for you.

But if possible I would like the planning application number and the
number of children that are currently permitted in the garden.

 

Having spoken to the planning team, I have attached a list of Planning
applications taken from the Planning System where in the proposed
description field the words Childminder, Nursery, Pre school, Creche or
Childcare appear. To determine any conditions there may be controlling the
number of children at play in the garden would involve checking each
individual decision notice. This information is already in the public
domain and you will be able to check applications (From August 2005) via
Planning Online..
[1]http://www.bristol.gov.uk/page/planning-...
for applications Pre-August 2005 this would typically involve making an
appointment to view particular application(s) by telephoning 0117 922 3000

 

To further assist however, if after looking through the information
attached there are a small number of these older applications that are of
particular interest, please let me know.

 

This response should answer your request in full, however if you are not
satisfied with this response or wish to lodge an appeal against any
exemptions that may have been applied, you can do so by writing to the
Data Protection Officer at Bristol City Council Legal Services, City Hall,
College Green, Bristol, BS99 7PH or [2][Bristol City Council request email].  Details of the
complaints procedure can be found at
[3]http://www.bristol.gov.uk/complaints.

 

If, after you have exhausted the council’s complaints procedure, you are
still not satisfied with the response you have received you have the right
to complain to the Information Commissioner, details of your right to
complain can be found at [4]http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints.aspx

 

Copyright notice

The provision of information by Bristol City Council under this scheme
does not imply a right to reproduce or commercially exploit such
information without the Council's express prior written permission.

Reproduction or commercial exploitation of materials supplied under this
scheme without the express permission of Bristol City Council may be an
infringement of copyright.

The Council is unable to grant permission to reproduce or re-use any
material accessed through this scheme that is the property of third
parties. Permission to reproduce or re-use such material must be obtained
from the copyright holders.

 

Yours Sincerely

Steve Knight

Bristol City Council

Place

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Dear Steve Knight,

Thank you for getting back to me. I was rather hoping that somoene else could have a look through the database to find the specific information I requested. Sadly I do not have the time to do so myself.

Yours sincerely,

Hayley

Dear Steve Knight,

Is it possible to get an update on this?

Yours sincerely,

Hayley Evans

Freedom of Information, Bristol City Council

Dear Ms Evans

Thank you for your emails.

We have endeavoured to assist with your requests and are sorry that you have not been satisfied with our responses. We note that you have referred this matter to the ICO, which you are of course entitled to do, but thought that it may be useful to draw things together in one email to summarise our stance in any event.

As previously stated, we do hold a list of registered childminders, but do not consider this to be held for the purposes of s.3(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). We understand that you have now obtained that information from Ofsted. The planning information that you have requested is publicly available and is therefore exempt by virtue of s.21 of the FOIA which states that information is exempt from disclosure where it is accessible to the applicant by other means.

The FOIA does not require us to create information and therefore, even in the event that we did consider the OFSTED information to be ‘held’, we would not consider it to be our role to cross-reference the information and produce a report for you. The fact that we have already spent in excess of 18 hours in dealing with your combined requests is therefore a moot point.

You have questioned the veracity of the information that we have provided. We can confirm that it is, to the best of our knowledge, correct. The FOIA only requires us to disclose information that we hold and not to carry out investigations into presumed anomalies at the request of the applicant.

On behalf of

The FOI Team

______________________________________________________________________
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Dear Freedom of Information,

Hi there, thanks again for the reply. On the 22nd April, I asked what I naively felt was a very simple question - How many planning applications have this type of condition attached to them.

I do not know the ins and outs of the FOI Act and I do not know what information the council does and doesn't record. I had imagined that the database BCC has access too would be far superior to the one provided on the search page at BCC website.

When I looked at the search page as suggested in your response 28th May, I could not find an answer to my question; I can find lots of applications that may contain the relevant data, but not the actual answer.

I do not believe that the answer to my question is publically available, it requires some serious digging through over 170 planning decisions. I do not consider this to be reasonably accessible and that is why I asked if it was possible to receive only the relevant decisions in my follow up dated 6th June which I received a response to on the 9th July.

I understand that BCC may have a personal issue with me and may not want to answer any of my FOI requests given that they are currently taking legal action against me.

I understand that you will not tell me how many planning applications have this type of condition attached and have advised me to read through 178 planning decisions to find an answer to my question.

Many thanks for your time,

Hayley Evans.

Nicholas Mimmack, Bristol City Council

Dear Ms Evans

 

We have now conducted internal reviews of three of your requests. Given
that these requests are inter-linked, it was felt that it would be
sensible, as per our previous email of 9 July 2014, to bring these matters
together for the purposes of review.

 

Response times

 

We accept that responses to you have not always been provided within the
20 working day statutory timeframe and we apologise for this.

 

OFSTED spreadsheet

 

We advised you that the OFSTED spreadsheet was not held by BCC for the
purposes of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). We have revised
this opinion on review. Whilst the spreadsheet did not originate with BCC,
it is nonetheless ‘held’. However, the requested EY numbers were provided
and we remain of the view that addresses on the spreadsheet constitute
personal data and are exempt from disclosure under s.40(2). On this basis,
we do not believe that there are any further disclosures to be made as
regards the spreadsheet.

 

 

Both of the below requests required addresses from the OFSTED spreadsheet
to be cross-referenced by our planning department against their database:

 

[1]https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/c...

[2]https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/c...

 

The Planning Team has no reason to compile records of the various types of
permission granted and therefore it is not possible to simply run a report
to pull out the requested information. It would be necessary to input each
of the 357 addresses into the database and then search through the entries
for each of those addresses to establish whether or not that address met
the criteria outlined in your above requests. Our Planning Team is of the
view that this would be likely to take anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes
on average to review each address. It is therefore estimated that this
task would take between 30 and 60 hours. On this basis, we remain of the
view that it was correct to rely upon completing the request taking longer
than the 18 hour limit in accordance with Regulation 5 (2) (b) of the
Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulations 2004 (Statutory Instrument No 3244).

 

 

Your final request relates to all childcare facilities as opposed to just
childminders:

 

[3]https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/n...

 

This information to be accessible by other means, namely the planning
portal, and therefore exempt in accordance with s.21 of the FOIA. As you
have stated:

 

“When I looked at the search page as suggested in your response 28^th May,
I could not find an answer to my question; I can find lots of applications
that may contain the relevant data, but not the actual
answer.

I do not believe that the answer to my question is publically available,
it requires some serious digging through over 170 planning decisions.”

 

BCC does not have an alternative more efficient system and therefore I’m
afraid that ultimately if you require this information, then it will be a
case of reviewing the information that is publicly available online. These
are the searches that would need to be conducted in relation to the
previous two requests, so perhaps this is at least illustrative of the
fact that it would take a significant amount of officer time to provide
this information. 

 

 

We would also like to assure you that any ongoing litigation is not a
relevant consideration in responding to FOI requests. Disclosures made in
accordance with the FOIA are to the world at large and the motive of the
requester is not relevant.

 

On behalf of

 

The FOI Team

 

You have exhausted the Council’s complaints procedure. If you are still
not satisfied with the response you have received, you have the right to
complain to the Information Commissioner, details of your right to
complain can be found at [4]http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints.aspx

 

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References

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2. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/c...
3. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/n...
4. http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints.aspx