Enter Directorate / Service Name Here

Adult and Community Services

Natalie Dewing

Data Protection & Information Officer

Phone: 020 8891 7058

Email:

OurRef: e14778, 14892,14899,14813,14986

9 October 2013

Dear Tanya Bird/Hatton

Re: Request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000

I am writing in response to your outstanding requests for information. I note that you have made numerous requests under the name Tanya Hatton and the name Tanya Bird. Some of these requests have been follow up requests to previous responses.

I have attached a list of all the FOI requests made in the last 3 months. To clarify the outstanding requests are as follows:

1. Follow up request to 14778 received on 13 September (deadline 11 October)
2. 14892 received on 13 September (deadline 11 October)
3. 14899 [Follow up to 14835] received on 16 September (deadline 14 October)
4. Follow up to request 14813 received on 16 September (deadline 14 October)
5. 14986 received on 3 October (deadline 31 October)

In regards to the fourth request, the follow up to 14813, we appreciate that we did not provide you with the information you requested. Therefore you bought this to our attention. We apologise for the confusion, this was an over sight due to the amount of requests received on the subject.

I can confirm that the response to your request for the breakdown of 3 and 4 bedroom properties that became available to the council for nomination from all other housing associations excluding RHP during 2011 to present is as follows:

99 households were nominated to 3 bedroom properties.

5 to 4 bedroom properties. 3 of these were in Hanworth, 1 was in Hampton and 1 was in Twickenham.

In regards to your follow up request to 14778we have confirmed that there is no subsidy for rents. If you are requesting historical data this is a new request. You suggest the information you require is contained in Committee reports, these are publically available and therefore the information is exempt under section 21 as it is accessible to you by other means.

I realise you are not satisfied that we were unable to provide you with a detailed breakdown of payments to RHP. Rather than issuing a refusal we attempted to offer advice and assistance byproviding total payments with an explanation that we are unable to easily break this information down by housing association as it is not recorded in this way.

I appreciate you would like a detailed explanation as to why this information cannot be provided so that you can make a decision on whether to pursue this issue further. I have therefore included this in the in the refusal below. I note that you have stated you would like an internal review of our original response to the request 14778. I hope that this letter is able to clarify the reason for not providing the information. If you remain dissatisfied details on how to appeal this decision is explained below.

Your follow up request referenced 14899 is also a request for new information i.e. details of any payments made to tenants of 83 Priory Road by third parties.

We are refusing these new requests and the breakdown of payments to RHP as we believe the time required to respond to these requests would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours.

Please see below for the detailed legal reasoning behind this decision.

Detailed legal reasoning for refusal

Section 12: Exceeds the appropriate limit

We are not able to provide theinformation requested as we consider that to do so would exceed the appropriate limit, as specified in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004; therefore section 12(1) of the Act applies.

The appropriate limit has been set at £450 and may include working hours of any person acting on our behalf at a rate of £25 per hour. This equates to 18 hours to locate and extract the relevant information.

Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations states two or more requests can be aggregated for the purposes of the cost limit if the requests are made by the same person for the same or similar information and are received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

This is the case with the eleven requests received from you in regards the relationship between the Council and RHP in relation to housing allocations. We have responded to seven requests and we estimate that it has taken an average of 1.5 hours to respond to each of these requests. Therefore we have currently spent over 10 hours locating and extracting the information you have requested.

In order to respond to your request for a breakdown of payments to RHP we would need to manually review all payments over the last two years. We estimate that it would take in the region of 8 hours to locate and extract the information requested.

Furthermore we estimate it could take an additional 5 hours to respond to the rest of the outstanding information requested.

As a result we estimate that responding to these requests would take approximately 23 hours. This exceeds18 hours and therefore to locate and extract this information would exceed the appropriate limit.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 thisletter acts as a Refusal Notice.

You have the right of appeal against the decision. If you wish to appeal please set out in writing your grounds of appeal and send to:

Corporate Complaints and Access to Information Manager

Community Engagement and Accountability Team

Adult and Community Services

3rd Floor Civic Centre

44 York Street

Twickenham

TW1 3BZ

E-mail:

If you are dissatisfied with the outcome of the internal appeal you may appeal further to the Information Commissioner’s Office at:

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

fax: 01625 524 510

DX 20819

Kind regards

Natalie Dewing

Data Protection and Information Officer