Transactions over £25,000 from December 2017

The request was successful.

Dear Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Foundation Trust,

Thank you for publishing your spend data here: http://www.ldh.nhs.uk/contact-us/press-e.... However, I notice that you haven't published any spending data since December 2017.

I'd like to make a request under the Freedom of Information act for all transactions over £25,000 from December 2017 at most a month in arrears from the date at which you publish in response to this request.

Please provide the data in a machine readable format (preferably csv). As a minimum, please make sure to include the date, value and recipient of each transaction. Please also provide details on the procurement category of each transaction if you have it.

Your team may also be interested in the guidance on producing spending data:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio.... This letter makes it clear that this guidance applies to the NHS: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/sy....

For the avoidance of doubt, I am making this request under the Freedom of Information Act. I await your response within 20 working days.

Yours faithfully,

Helen McNally

FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Dear Helen

Thank you for your request for information which will be processed under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We will aim to provide you with the requested information within the legal deadline.

The request is subject to any exemption which the Trust is entitled to apply, some of which are absolute and some of which only apply where the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs that in disclosing the information.

Once the information has been identified the Trust may also ask that a fee be paid for processing and delivering the information to you. Details of any fee to be charged will be notified to you as soon as possible.

Any future correspondence you may have in relation to this matter should be marked private & confidential and sent to the Freedom of Information Lead. Luton and Dunstable NHS Trust, Lewsey Road, Luton, Beds, LU4 0DZ or emailed to the address above.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information Team.

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Dear Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Foundation Trust,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Foundation Trust's handling of my FOI request 'Transactions over £25,000 from December 2017'.

On 24 August 2018, I sent you an FOI request for your expenditure over £25,000 from January 2018 to present. I never received a response beyond an acknowledgement.

The guidance for publishing spend data for government departments states:
2.10 Spend is to be published one month in arrears, ie by the last working day of the month following the month to which the data relates. If the data is available before the end of the month, it should be published as soon as the department has cleared it for release. This data is to be published in individual monthly files.
2.11 You should not hold up the publication of your data where you have unresolved individual queries. You should publish the cleared data within the publication timescales, and amend the data at a later date if necessary. See section 2.5 for further detail on applying redactions to the data.

Please see here for more details: https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio....

For this reason, I would like to request an Internal Review of the initial response to my Freedom of Information request.

I await your response within 20 working days.

Yours faithfully,

Spend Network

FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

1 Attachment

Dear Helen

I Write further to your email below requesting a review of your Freedom of Information request.

Firstly I would like apologise for not having responded to your email sooner.

I have looked into your request and I have identified that a response to your request was created on 17/9/18. However, unfortunately it appears that the response was never emailed to you.

I now attach our response.

Please accept my apologies for this error and any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Kind regards

FOI Team

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Dear FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Thank you for responding to my request and providing me with the data. However, you appear to have not released any data for February and March 2018.

Please could you rectify this issue.

Yours sincerely,

Spend Network

FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Dear Helen
Thank you for your email the Trust is looking into this for you and we will respond ASAP

Kind Regards
Freedom Of Information Team

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FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

2 Attachments

Dear Helen

I have downloaded these from our website and attached them for you.

Kind regards
FOI Team

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Dear FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Thank you for your response. Having now received all the data I requested, I have review the data and it appears to be mixed up with several other months in each month's data. For example, your data for May 2018 only contains one entry for May 2018 and data from months going back to April 2017. Please could you review this or explain why the data is like this.

Yours sincerely,

Spend Network

FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Dear Helen

Our Finance Department has provided the following clarification:

It is invoice dates paid in the relevant month. I.e. the May 2018 file contains the payments made in May 2018 but shows the invoice dates rather than the payment dates as we are unable to capture the payment date in the Finance System with all the transactional data required. This is a legitimate option as per the government guidance in this area.

Please do not hesitate to contact the Trust if we can assist further.

Kind regards
FOI Team

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FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Dear Helen
This was an oversight and this is now uploaded and available. Please accept the Trusts apologies.

Kind Regards
Freedom Of Information Team

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Dear FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Please could you provide me with a link to your website where the data is located.

Yours sincerely,

Spend Network

FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Dear Helen
http://www.ldh.nhs.uk/corporate-informat...

Kind Regards
Freedom Of Information Team

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Dear FOILeads (RC9) Luton & Dunstable Hospital FT,

Thank you for providing me with your website, I appreciate your cooperation.

Yours sincerely,

Spend Network