01 July 2022
Your request & our response
Please send me all available details relating to the following questions:
Has your local authority employed any entire children’s social work team, sometimes referred to as a managed team, through an agency over the last five years? How many teams have you used ? Please provide details as a year-on-year breakdown.
Lambeth Council does not employ such a team
If so, which area of children’s social care were agency teams employed to cover?
N/A
How long were any agency children’s social work teams employed by the local authority - please provide the average length of each assignment?
N/A
What was the cost of employing children’s social work teams, sometimes referred to as managed teams, through an agency, to the local authority over the last five years, as a year-on-year breakdown?
N/A
I am also looking for:
Details regarding the number of children’s social workers employed individually through an agency by your local authority over the last five years as a year-on-year breakdown.
|
Row Labels |
Sum of # of unique Worker Name |
|
2018 |
163 |
|
2019 |
198 |
|
2020 |
213 |
|
2021 |
241 |
The cost to the local authority of employing individual children’s social workers (permanent staff not agency) over the last five years.
|
2019-20 |
5,091,986.35 |
|
2020-21 |
4,541,606.89 |
|
2021-22 |
5,107,848.68 |
I can confirm that we have reviewed your request to provide these figures for the years 2017-8 and 2018019 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)
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 this request would exceed 18 hours.
The process of retrieving and collecting the data is therefore likely to exceed 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 limit the search to months or weeks; however please note that this advice does not guarantee that you will receive the information requested.
If you are unable to release any of this information on the grounds of a breach of confidentiality, please supply me with copies of the corresponding signed confidentiality agreement.