07 April 2022
Your request & our response
- how much funding has the Council / Authority allocated in its budget each year since April 2013 for its replacement scheme to the Social Fund (please do not include funding for dealing with the Covid 19 pandemic);
2013/14: £1,588,613
2014/15: £2,696,613
2015/16: £1,676,613
2016/17: £1,074,000
2017/18: £700,000
2018/19: £265,689
2019/20: £265,689
2020/21: £500,000
2021/22: £300,000
- details of all local welfare provision schemes provided by the Council since April 2013 (please do not include funding for dealing with the Covid 19 pandemic);
Please review https://beta.lambeth.gov.uk/benefits-financial-support
- who can apply for assistance;
Please review https://beta.lambeth.gov.uk/benefits-financial-support
- details of the application process for residents (if possible please include links to application forms and information about the scheme on the Council's website);
Please review https://beta.lambeth.gov.uk/benefits-financial-support
- what assistance is offered;
Please review https://beta.lambeth.gov.uk/benefits-financial-support
- how much has been paid to local residents under the Council's / Authority's scheme(s) since April 2013 (please would you break this down into yearly amounts);
2013/14: £503,087
2014/15: £422,646
2015/16: £405,078
2016/17: £473,411
2017/18: £401,836
2018/19: £416,258
2019/20: £415,119
2020/21: £539,701
2021/22: £881,651
- how much has been spent on other items such as furniture and white goods (please would you break this down into yearly amounts;
2013/14: £270,967
2014/15: £300,255
2015/16: £305,812
2016/17: £348,615
2017/18: £307,197
2018/19: £315,224
2019/20: £313,622
2020/21: £356,072
2021/22: £348,148
- how to challenge decisions;
Requesting review of a decision is made via the team’s mailbox at Essteam@lambeth.gov.uk
- How many local review requests / complaints the Council has received about local welfare provision since April 2013.
Local review request data is not held.
On the current complaints management system, which was adopted 01/09/2020, 16 complaints have been logged to date referencing ESS/HSS.
Reviewing the old management system, from 01/01/2013 to date there were 52 cases referencing ESS/HSS.
There may be more cases relating to the service which have not been included in these results. This is because the customer may not have specified ‘ESS’ or ‘HSS’ in their complaint. A deeper check would require accessing each individual case; due to complaints volumes this would inevitably exceed 18 hours of work. Therefore we are engaging Section 12 as per below:
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.
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
In this instance, the process of extracting the information from the document exceeds the Appropriate Limit as provided by The Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
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 of work. The process of retrieving and extracting 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 specify a time period such as a week or month in a specific year as this will reduce the cases that need to be manually searched however please note the above suggestion does not guarantee that the information you requested can be provided.