20 July 2022
Your request
In relation to the first 20 cases of children that were taken into care (either interim or full) by your authority in the 2022 calendar year please provide me with the following information in connection with each of these cases.
1. The sex of the child?
2. The age of the child?
3. If any of the following factors are recorded in the papers you hold on the case as having been a factor in the council’s decision to take the child into care:
(a) proximity to a dangerous dog
(b) the obesity of the child,
(c) a concern the child spends too much time playing computer games and/or on the internet,
(d) the child’s home environment is unhealthy due to cigarette smoke,
(e) the parents do not care adequately for the child because they spend too much time watching television and/or on the internet or
(f) that the child is not being given enough food to eat.
NOTE: Please note that if you feel providing an answer to Q.1 and Q.2 with Q3 would breach S.40 then I would request that you ONLY answer Q.3. If you decide to take that option I would ask you to justify your decision as I reserve my right to appeal against it.
NOTE: If scrutinizing the papers for the first 20 care cases would breach the cost limit under FoI then please limit the search to just the first 10 cases.
Our response
|
Female |
Male |
|
|
10 |
10 |
2.
|
Age |
Female |
Male |
|
0 |
0 |
2 |
|
1 |
2 |
1 |
|
6 |
2 |
0 |
|
8 |
0 |
2 |
|
10 |
1 |
0 |
|
11 |
0 |
1 |
|
12 |
1 |
0 |
|
15 |
1 |
0 |
|
17 |
3 |
4 |
3. I can confirm that we have reviewed your request but consider that to comply with the request would exceed the cost/time limit specified by s12 FOIA.
Section 12 (cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit)
12. — (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.
In this instance, we have decided that the process of determining whether the information is held will exceed the Appropriate Limit as provided by The Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
The Appropriate Limit applies to costs/time the Council reasonably expects to use in carrying out the following activities to comply with your request:
- Determine whether the information is held
- Locating the information or documents containing the information
- Retrieving such information or documents
- Extracting the information from the document
The Appropriate Limit is currently set at £450 which is the equivalent to 18 hours of work at £25 per hour.
It is estimated that to retrieve the information for ten cases as per this request would require a manual trawl to identify and review the factors listed a-d. This careful reading of each file would take approximately 5 hours per child/file for a total of 50 hours for 10 children, or 100 hours for 20 children.
The process of retrieving and collecting the data therefore exceeds the Appropriate Limit.
In accordance with Section 17 FOIA this letter represents a Refusal Notice for this request.
Should you wish to redefine or shorten your request then please resubmit another request to us and we will consider if we can respond. For example, you may reduce the number of cases even further, and/or reduce the factors being researched. Please note that this advice does not guarantee the information will be supplied.