Subject access requests- GDPR

Lisa Donovan made this Freedom of Information request to Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Automatic anti-spam measures are in place for this older request. Please let us know if a further response is expected or if you are having trouble responding.

The request was successful.

Dear Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman,
Please could you kindly take a look at the following questions:

1. How many SARs (not other types of data protection requests) have been made to the council in the last 12 months?
2. How many SAR requests have gone over a deadline (either the standard 30 day allocation or the extended 90 day allocation for more complicated responses)?
3. How many staff are usually contacted to provide data to contribute to the request?
4. On average how many hours are spent dealing with a SAR?
5. Do you have any software to assist with SAR production and if so, which?
6. Who has budget responsibility over the costs & resources required to respond to the SARs? Please provide
Name:
Title:
Direct Email:
Direct Phone Number:
7. How many employee SARs have you received in the last 12 months and how many went over the deadline (either the standard 30 day or 90 extended)?

Thank you very much!

Yours faithfully,

Lisa Donovan

InformationRights, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Thank you for contacting the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s
(PHSO) Freedom of Information and Data Protection Team. This is to confirm
we have received your request. If you have made a request for information
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or Environment Information
Regulations 2004, we aim to respond to your request within 20 working days
in accordance with the statutory time frames set out in both Acts. If you
have made a request for personal information held by the PHSO, your
request will be processed as a Subject Access Request under the provisions
of the Data Protection Act 2018 and we aim to respond within one calendar
month in accordance with the statutory time frame set out in the Act. We
may contact you before this time if we require further clarification or if
we need to extend the time required to complete your request.

Please note that we are currently experiencing a high demand, and might
not be able to comply with the statutory deadline for your request. Any
late responses can be referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office:

https://ico.org.uk/

For Subject Access Requests, we will send any personal information via
secure email, unless you instruct us differently. To access the
information on the email we send, you will need to sign up to our secure
email service. Details can be found on our website using the link below:
https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...
If you require us to post your personal information to you instead you
will need to inform us of this and confirm your current address as soon as
possible. Angharad Jackson Data Protection Officer & Assistant Director
Information Assurance Office of the Parliamentary and Health Service
Ombudsman PHSO CityGate 47-51 Mosley Street Manchester M2 3HQ
[email address]

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

27/03/2023

Dear Lisa Donovan,

PHSO Reference 00000763

Acknowledgement of your request for information

Thank you for your correspondence of 27 March 2023.

Your correspondence will be handled as a request under the Freedom of
Information Act 2000. We aim to issue a full response by 26 April 2023.

If we require further information or cannot meet this deadline, we will
let you know.

You may find the information you are looking for on our website as part of
our [1]Publication Scheme or [2]Casework.

To find out more about how we handle your personal data and information
requests, please see our [3]Privacy Policy.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information/Data Protection Team

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

References

Visible links
1. https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...
2. https://decisions.ombudsman.org.uk/
3. https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/co...

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Dear Lisa Donovan,
Thank you for your request for information about :

Freedom of Information request about subject access requests

which was received on 27/03/2023

The department reasonably requires further information in order to
identify and locate the information that you have asked for

We will not be able to take this matter further without extra information
from you. In particular, it would be useful to know :

Can you please confirm the request is for the information relating to
Subject Access Requests made to the Parliamentary and Health Service
Ombudsman. We note that point 1 of your request refers to "the council" we
only hold information about requests made to us and we do not hold data
relating to Subject Access Requests made to other organisations. 

If you believe we have made an error in the way we have processed your
information request, it is open to you to request an internal review. You
can do this by writing to us by post or by email to
[1][PHSO request email]. You will need to specify what the
nature of the issue is and we can consider the matter further. Beyond
that, it is open to you to complain to the Information Commissioner’s
Office ([2]www.ico.org.uk).

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information/Data Protection Team

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

PHSO CityGate

47-51 Mosley Street

Manchester

M2 3HQ

E: [3][PHSO request email]

W: [4]www.ombudsman.org.uk

Want to know more about your information rights? Read our privacy notice

References

Visible links
1. mailto:[PHSO request email]
2. http://www.ico.org.uk/
3. mailto:[PHSO request email]
4. http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/
http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/

Dear Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman,

Apologies for my typo, I meant Subject Access Requests made to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, not the council.

Yours faithfully,

Lisa Donovan

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Dear Lisa Donovan,
I am writing regarding your request for information about:
Freedom of Information request about subject access requests

which was received on 27/03/2023

I am writing to confirm that I received the extra information regarding
your request. We will now restart the Assessment process and advise you
accordingly.

If you have any queries about this letter, please contact me. Please
remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information/Data Protection Team

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

PHSO CityGate

47-51 Mosley Street

Manchester

M2 3HQ

E: [1][PHSO request email]

W: [2]www.ombudsman.org.uk

Want to know more about your information rights? Read our privacy notice

References

Visible links
1. mailto:[PHSO request email]
2. http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/
http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

1 Attachment

Dear Lisa Donovan,
Thank you for your email of 27/03/2023. in which you requested information
from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Your request has been
handled in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Your request:

1. How many SARs (not other types of data protection requests) have been
made to the council in the last 12 months?

2. How many SAR requests have gone over a deadline (either the standard 30
day allocation or the extended 90 day allocation for more complicated
responses)?

3. How many staff are usually contacted to provide data to contribute to
the request?

4. On average how many hours are spent dealing with a SAR?

5. Do you have any software to assist with SAR production and if so,
which?

6. Who has budget responsibility over the costs & resources required to
respond to the SARs? Please provide name, title, direct email, direct
phone number.

7. How many employee SARs have you received in the last 12 months and how
many went over the deadline (either the standard 30 day or 90 extended)?”

Our response:

 1. The provisional figure is 339. Please note this is subject to change
due to year-end data cleansing.
 2. The provisional figure is 33. Please note this is subject to change
due to year-end data cleansing.
 3. None. Typically all the relevant information is accessible within our
case management system
 4. This information is not held.
 5. We typically use House on the Hill, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft
Word, Microsoft Excel and Nitro PDF for assistance in responding to
SARs.
 6. The person with budgetary responsibility is Assistant Director
Angharad Jackson. The names of our staff at Assistant Director level
and above are available on our website and the senior staff structure
is published. We have attached the most up to date structure as the
one available on the website is slightly outdated.

However, regarding your request for contact information, the direct
contact details of our senior members of staff are personal information,
only disclosed when appropriate and if it is in the public interest to
disclose.

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) considers that
disclosure of this information would be unfair and in breach of the first
data protection principle. The requested information is being withheld
under Section 40(2) and Section 40(3)a of the Freedom of Information Act
2000.

There are adequate channels of communication to the Parliamentary and
Health Service Ombudsman and its staff, such as through our advice line
(0345 015 4033) and our email address [1][email address].

7. We are unable to provide you with the information you requested as we
do not record the information in any retrievable format.

Under section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 the PHSO is
allowed to refuse any request which exceeds the appropriate limit. The
appropriate limit is set in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection
(Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (‘the Fees Regulations’) at
£450 for the PHSO.

To obtain the information we would have to manually inspect each case
individually and attempt to identify whether the person making the request
was an employee. As there were 339 requests made last year this would
allow just over 3 minutes per case to look at the request and retrieve the
information which may not be readily available. This is assuming that they
used an internal email to make the request or that the information
requested was related to their employment.

The Fees Regulations also specify that the cost of complying with a
request must be calculated at the rate of £25 per hour, meaning that
section 12(1) effectively imposes a time limit of 18 hours (or 1,080
minutes) to be spent doing the following activities:

· Determining whether the information is held

· Locating the information, or a document containing it

· Retrieving the information, or a document containing it

· Extracting the information from a document containing it.

PHSO has an obligation under Section 16(1) of the Freedom of Information
Act 2000 to provide advice and assistance to requesters. Where a request
is refused under Section 12(1), this means that PHSO should recommend ways
the scope of the request could be reduced so that it would take less than
18 hours to obtain the relevant information.

We may be able to obtain the information for a shorter period such as six
months.

We hope that this information is useful.

If you believe we have made an error in the way we have processed your
information request, it is open to you to request an internal review. You
can do this by writing to us by post or by email to
[2][PHSO request email]. You will need to specify what the
nature of the issue is and we can consider the matter further. Beyond
that, it is open to you to complain to the Information Commissioner’s
Office ([3]www.ico.org.uk).

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information/Data Protection Team

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

PHSO CityGate

47-51 Mosley Street

Manchester

M2 3HQ

E: [4][PHSO request email]

W: [5]www.ombudsman.org.uk

Want to know more about your information rights? Read our privacy notice

References

Visible links
1. mailto:[email address]
2. mailto:[PHSO request email]
3. http://www.ico.org.uk/
4. mailto:[PHSO request email]
5. http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/
http://www.ombudsman.org.uk/