Environment Agency management system document: uncontrolled when printed [14/07/10]

Work Instruction
Charging for Information
Number: / 384_04 / Status: / Version 1 / Issue Date: / 31/12/04 / Review Due: / 31/12/05
Document Owner:
Document Author:
Primary Contact: / Chris Jarvis
Chris Jarvis
Chris Jarvis / Post:
Post:
Post: / FOI Policy Manager
FOI Policy Manager
FOI Policy Manager
Approved by:
(as set out in Schedule B of the NFSoD) / Stefan Carlyle
Chris Jarvis
Malcolm Lythgo / Post:
Post:
Post: / Head of SATIS
Freedom of Information Policy Manager
Head of Operations
Purpose: / To provide guidance to Agency staff responding to requests for information to ensure a consistent Agency-wide approach to the charges that should be levied for the provision of information to third parties.
Scope: /
  • This Work Instruction supports the Responding to Requests for Information Procedure.
  • It applies to all staff within the Agency, with responsibility for providing information in response to requests.

Related Documents: /
  • 400_04 Responding to Requests for Information Procedure

If you have any queries on the content of this document or suggestions for improvement, refer to the Primary Contact named above.
If any term or acronym used in this document is unfamiliar you might find the definition in the Glossary on Easinet: Information Resources > Glossary of Terms and Acronyms.
Test and Action Points / Procedures / Outputs
References
Definition of a request / In addition to the definition in the AMS Procedure for Responding to Requests for Informatio, for charging purposes a request is treated as being:
  1. an individual request for existing information.
  2. a request for a series of supplies of information each of which is substantially the same in nature, but different only by being in relation to a different time period (a "standing order" request")
  3. where we are not requested for a ‘series’, but where we identify a third request for information of the same kind, and from that point advise the enquirer that the third and subsequent request will be treated as if one ("deemed standing order requests")
For Standing Order requests (ii and iii), we will charge for the rest of that financial year and thereafter by financial year.
Step 1.
Determine whether the request is Exempt. / The following bodies are exempt from Charges (other than charges for value added services as set out in the appendix ‘list of fixed charges’):
Media. Any request from the ‘media’, which has been referred to and determined as being ‘a media request’ by the Agency Corporate Affairs department, shall be exempt if it is reasonable. ‘Reasonable’ for this purpose is defined as the total costs of time and materials, at the Agency Standard Charging for Information charge rates, to the value of £450; or a higher value at the written request of the Agency Corporate Affairs department.
Bodies are exempt from Charges in the following circumstances (only if the request comes directly from the relevant body.- consultants and agents acting on their behalf are not exempt):
Contract. Where we have agreed in a contract or Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a statutory or regulatory body or ‘not for profit’ organisation, then we shall not charge for the costs of supplying the information if that contract or MOU does not provide for charging. Nor are charges to be made for information supplied to Agency contractors who require the information to fulfil their contract/s with the Agency and use the information solely for those purposes.
Statutory duty to disclose. If we are under a statutory duty to supply the information to a particular person or body, then we will not charge unless there is an express provision to allow us to do so. Data protection subject access requests should, however, not be charged for. An example of this is a request from a water undertaker that relates to data covered by the Water Resources Act 1991 Section 197 and Section 203.
To qualify for this exemption, the enquirer must quote the relevant statutory provision. This will typically be;
(i)a third party public body using their own legislation to require us to answer their questions;
(ii)or information that must be supplied under litigation procedures.
The following types of information are exempt from charges:
Current Consultations. when a request is made for consultation documents (e.g. LEAPS, Water Resources Strategy documents) within the consultation period, no charge shall be made for these specific, requested consultation documents. / If yes go to step 6
If no go to step 2
Step 1.
Determine whether the request is Exempt. / The following bodies are exempt from Charges (other than charges for value added services as set out in the appendix ‘list of fixed charges’):
  • Media. Any request from the ‘media’, which has been referred to and determined as being ‘a media request’ by the Agency Corporate Affairs department, shall be exempt if it is reasonable. ‘Reasonable’ for this purpose is defined as the total costs of time and materials, at the Agency Standard Charging for Information charge rates, to the value of £450; or a higher value at the written request of the Agency Corporate Affairs department.
Bodies are exempt from Charges in the following circumstances (only if the request comes directly from the relevant body.- consultants and agents acting on their behalf are not exempt):
  • Contract. Where we have agreed in writing in a contract or Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with a statutory or regulatory body or ‘not for profit’ organisation, then we shall not charge for the costs of supplying the information if that contract or MOU does not provide for charging. Nor are charges to be made for information supplied to Agency contractors who require the information to fulfil their contract/s with the Agency and use the information solely for those purposes.
  • Statutory duty to disclose. If we are under a statutory duty to supply the information to a particular person or body, then we will not charge unless there is an express provision to allow us to do so. Data protection subject access requests should, however, not be charged for. An example of this is a request from a water undertaker that relates to data covered by the Water Resources Act 1991 Section 197 and Section 203.
To qualify for this exemption, the enquirer must quote the relevant statutory provision. This will typically be;
(i)a third party public body using their own legislation to require us to answer their questions;
(ii)or information that must be supplied under litigation procedures.
The following types of information are exempt from charges:
  • Current Consultations. when a request is made for consultation documents (e.g. Strategy documents) within the consultation period, no charge shall be made for these specific, requested consultation documents.
/ If yes go to step 6
If no go to step 2
Step 2.
Assess whether the information is readily available to a member of the public. / Reasonably accessible information will include information included in the Freedom of Information Publication Scheme (this includes all Agency ‘public registers’) and can also include:
other published information (including Agency publications with a cover charge);
other information published on the Internet (whether on the Agency’s web site or other places);
other information available to the public in Agency and other public access libraries, including information that may be retrieved via an inter-library loan request;
other information that has been proactively made available to the public whether by the Agency or others (e.g. local authority public registers and commercial publishers).
NB
WE MUST PROVIDE DETAILS OF WHERE THE INFORMATION IS REASONABLY ACCESSIBLE
THE SPECIAL PROVISIONS RELATING TO ACCESSIBILITY (see Appendix 2) MUST BE CONSIDERED PARTICULARLY IF THE INFORMATION IS NOT INCLUDED IN OUR PUBLICATION SCHEME / If yes go to step 7
If no go to step 3
Step 2.
Assess whether the information is readily available to a member of the public. / Reasonably accessible information will include information included in the Freedom of Information Publication Scheme (this includes all Agency ‘public registers’) and can also include:
  • other published information (including Agency publications with a cover charge);
  • other information published on the Internet (whether on the Agency’s web site or other places);
  • other information available to the public in Agency and other public access libraries, including information that may be retrieved via an inter-library loan request;
  • other information that has been proactively made available to the public whether by the Agency or others (e.g. local authority public registers and commercial publishers).
NB
  • We must provide details of where the information is reasonably accessible
  • The special provisions relating to accessibility (see Appendix 3) must be considered, particularly if the information is not included in our publication scheme
/ If yes go to step 7
If no go to step 3
Step 3.
Determine whether the information will be commercially used in a way that needs an intellectual property licence / . It will normally be assumed that a business of any kind wishes to have copying rights and so needs an intellectual property licence unless they indicate otherwise to us either in the request or after the cost estimate but before the information is supplied. IF we receive in time a request to receive the data without any further rights than statutory rights then apply this step by determining that they do not need an intellectual property licence and determine whether to charge or not in the same way as for non-businesses.
If it is apparent that information will be passed on as part of or in connection with a chargeable service then you should in addition to applying this step pass on the details to the Data and Information Exploitation manager in SATIS as the usage would appear to be that of a value added reseller.
Note that the quick and easy step should not be applied if this step applies. / If yes go to step 10
If no go to step 4
.
Step 3.
Determine whether the information will be commercially used in a way that needs an intellectual property licence / It will normally be assumed that a business of any kind wishes to have copying rights and so needs an intellectual property licence unless they indicate otherwise to us either in the request or after the cost estimate but before the information is supplied. IF we receive in time a request to receive the data without any further rights than statutory rights then apply this step by determining that they do not need an intellectual property licence and determine whether to charge or not in the same way as for non-businesses.
If it is apparent that information will be passed on as part of or in connection with a chargeable service then you should in addition to applying this step pass on the details to the Data and Information Exploitation manager in SATIS as the usage would appear to be that of a value added reseller.
Note that the quick and easy step should not be applied if this step applies. / If yes go to step 10
If no go to step 4
.
Step 4.
Determine whether the cost of retrieving and collating the information will exceed £450. / Determination of whether the cost of retrieving and collating the information will exceed £450 is to be based upon staff costs calculated at the Agency Standard Charging for Information charge rate of £25 per hour.
Do not include Agency’s costs for reasonable quantities of black and white photocopying made upon Agency machines, other than the costs of the staff time incurred by the Agency whilst making the copies. Reasonable in this instance has been taken to be 500 sheets of A4 paper whether copies are made double-sided or not. If the number of copies goes above 500 sheets, then the cost of copies must be included along with staff costs in determining the overall cost at the rate of £5 for every 50 copies.
Do include costs attributable to external parties that may be separately identified as those costs incurred by the Agency solely for the purpose of retrieving and collating the information required (e.g. additional temporary staff, archive retrieval costs etc.).
The Agency shall aggregate requests for the purposes of determining whether the request falls under £450 if:
  • requests are received within a period of 60 consecutive working days; and
  • multiple requests from one person, or by different persons who appear to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign; and
  • if the requests relate to substantially the same subject matter or substantially the same location or locality. Examples of this include:
-river water quality for the same stretch of water, but relate to different time periods;
-river water quality for different stretches of water, but relates to the same time period;
-different sections from the same file or set of files;
-information from different sources that pertain to the same issue;
-or any other series of requests that could be sensibly phrased as one request.
Decisions on aggregation should be taken at no lower than Team Leader level. / If yes go to step 10
If no go to step 5
Step 5.
Determining whether the request is repeated or vexatious? / If the Agency has previously provided an appropriate response to a request for information then if:
  • the same request, or one that is substantially the same, is posed again by a person or body whom an Agency officer believes to be acting in concert with the original requestor; and
  • this occurs within a period of time over which there is little likelihood of a significant change in the information to be provided;
then this is deemed to be a repeated request.
Vexatious means the following :
  • a request where either the content or motivation would be considered unreasonable by an independent third party; and
  • something that a normal, reasonable member of the public would not ask of the Agency.
/ If yes go to step 10
If no go to step 6
Step 6.
Supplying Information Free of charge / This means that no charge shall be made and the standard accompanying notice on the use of the information should be included.
(see separate guidance in AMS process for responding to requests for information) / No charge is to be made
Step 7.
Determining whether the customer will obtain the information from the readily available source? / The Agency shall provide, free of charge, full details of where and how to obtain the information. If the customer is unwilling to obtain the information from the published source, then the Agency shall charge for the supply of this information. / If yes go to step 8
If no go to step 9
Step 8.
When the information is obtained elsewhere. / Where the information is obtained from a personal visit to a public register or otherwise to inspect information at Agency premises, no charges shall be made for:
  • an explanation of how the register works and location of a suitable photocopier;
  • photocopying of reasonable quantities of register material by the visitor;
  • photocopying by Agency staff where facilities for visitors to make their own copies are not provided. This is taken to imply a degree of reasonability, which for this purpose limits the number of photocopies to being less than 500, as detailed in step 4.
If the visitor requests staff time other than the above, then the visitor should be deemed as not having obtained the information from another source (i.e. ‘no’ in answer to box 7). / Customer obtains information from readily available source.
Step 9.
Determining whether the information is quick and easy to supply? / We shall always supply information free of charge if there is minimal cost to the Agency unless it is in connection with a commercial service (and hence box 3 applies and bypasses this step). This is defined as:
  • Any request that can be answered in-person, by telephone, e-mail or by means of a written response where the total work involved takes no greater than 30 minutes;
  • Requests for readily available Agency leaflets (this does not include publications with a cover charge, which must be charged for in all circumstances).
  • Explaining how any public register works.
These definitions are subject to the request not being:
  • a request that can be aggregated as defined in step 4;
  • a repeated/vexatious request as defined in step 5;
/ If yes go to step 6
If no go to step 10
Step 10.
Applying a Charge or Refusing. / The Agency Standard Charging for Information charge rates shall be based on the following:
Staff time to answer the request at £12.50 per half hour or part half hour. In estimating the work involved in responding to a request, the following should be included:
time spent on the estimate itself;
collating available data and information;
assessing confidentiality for the request. This includes, for example, writing to licence holders, assessing received responses, including assessing statutory and policy requirements for the request.(subject to checking new regs)
providing the response;
Payment processing costs at £25 per request (£5 if paid by debit/credit card where this option is available).
A reasonable number of photocopies will be provided for free. Reasonable, in this instance has been taken to be 500 sheets of A4 paper, whether copies are made double-sided or not. If the number of copies goes above 500 sheets, then the cost of copies must be included along with the other costs in determining the overall charge at the rate of £5 per whole set of 50 sheets.
Any costs attributable to external parties that may be separately identified as those costs arising solely for the purpose of providing the information required (e.g. temporary staff, postage, consumables, special equipment hire etc).
Where a fixed charge has been identified that charge replaces any hourly based charge if the request is only for the information supplied in the description of what the fixed charge applies to. If the same request includes information subject to a fixed charge and other information the request needs to be split into fixed charge information and non-fixed charge information for charging purposes.
where an information request relates to both chargeable and non-chargeable information, the request needs to be treated as two separate parts for charging purposes.
We reserve the right to make an additional charge for an intellectual property licence but will endeavour to be as transparent as we can as to when and how such charges will be made. Where a person is making money out of re-use of our data (usually as a value added reseller) then we would normally seek royalties.
In some instances there will be a fixed charge (see list at end) for information regardless of who asks for it, typically where we have prepared a special package of information as a value added service or where we are seeking to simplify charging administration with standard time estimates. (Note: Exemptions do not apply to value added service charges. Exemptions do apply to standard time estimate charges).