28 April 2023
Your request
1. Please provide a breakdown of council spending on community centres in your borough. Please provide the total sum for each individual community centre. Please provide the information broken down according to the following years:
- 2010
- 2020
- 2022
- 2023
2. Please also provide the cost of running each community centre including, but not limited to, staffing costs, material costs etc. Please provide the information for each community centre individually and for the following years:
- 2010
- 2020
- 2022
- 2023
3. Please also provide any information on additional funding your community centres received through non-council specific funding. Please provide sums of funding per transaction, source of funding and for which community centre the funding has been provided to. Please provide the information for the following years:
- 2010
- 2020
- 2022
- 2023
Could I please define community centres as "centres for the whole population within a geographic community that are run or rented out by the council".
Our response
- 2010 - granular data is no longer available.
2020 - interpreted as 2020-21 financial year. Please see attached workbook of costs
2022 - interpreted as 2022-23 financial year. Please see attached workbook of costs.
2023 - interpreted as 2023-24 financial year. Repairs and works are not yet invoiced and are therefore unavailable.
2. 2010 data is no longer available at the granular level. Regarding the other requested years, 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 this request would take at least 60 mins per record and there are 68 community center records which will need multiple files to be examined and computed giving a total of approximately 68 hours.
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; however please note that this is offered as advice and does not guarantee that the information can be provided.
However, as s per s16 of the Freedom of Information Act (duty to provide advice and assistance), we have been able identify some repairs which can be easily associated with specific facilities and are set out in the attached workbook.
3. Our records show there have been no non-council grants provided for Lambeth Council managed community centres.