FOI release

RFI 100: Meetings with Trade Associations

Updated 23 October 2024

RE: Freedom of Information Request - Meetings with Trade Associations

Thank you for your freedom of information request, received on 6 October 2024. This is being treated as a new FOI request and it has been allocated reference RFI 100.

I confirm that we hold the information which you have requested but estimate that the cost of compliance would exceed the cost limit of £450 prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (the Fee Regulations), and we are therefore refusing your request. This £450 limit is based on the work necessary to comply with your request being carried out at a rate of £25 per hour which equates to 18 hours. Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the FOIA) enables the SSRO to refuse an information request where compliance would exceed that cost limit. There are two circumstances which result in the cost of compliance exceeding the statutory limit, as explained below.

(1.) For the purposes of calculating the estimated cost of complying with the present request, Regulation 5 of the Fee Regulations provides that where two or more FOIA requests are made by the same person and received within any period of sixty consecutive working days, the estimated cost of compliance with the request is to be taken to be the total costs of complying with all of those requests which relate, to any extent, to the same or similar information.

Whether information captured by different requests is to any extent the same or similar is a matter of judgement to be applied by the SSRO. An indication that requests should be aggregated for the purposes of the Fee Regulations is whether there exists an “overarching theme or common thread running between the requests”. The SSRO previously received an FOIA request from you dated 23 August 2024 (allocated reference RFI 096), to which we responded on 23 September 2024. The scope of RFI 096 covered meetings between 4 named SSRO employees and representatives of the MOD’s Single Source Advisory Team (SSAT) held between 1 August 2023 and 31 July 2024. The scope of RFI 100 covers meetings between 3 of the same SSRO employees and a number of trade body representatives over the same period. It is likely that much of the information which would be captured under a response to RFI 100 was also captured, and has already been disclosed to you, under RFI 096 because many of the meetings may have been attended jointly by both SSAT and trade body representatives. The SSRO has therefore assessed that the information within scope of RFI 096 and RFI 100 is either the same or similar within the meaning of the Fee Regulations and, given that the total time taken to comply with RFI 096 was 27 hours, the cost limit equivalent of 18 hours has already been exceeded. As such, the earliest date you may submit a request for information within scope of RFI 100 is 18 November, being sixty working days from 23 August 2024.

(2.) As explained in our response to RFI 099 dated 4 October 2024, the response to RFI 096 has been used by the SSRO as a benchmark for estimating the hours it will take to comply with RFI 100. This is on the basis that the methodology applied for locating, retrieving and extracting the information will be the same. When responding to RFI 096, the SSRO confirmed the following:

“It took the SSRO 27 hours to extract and compile the information in order to respond to your request. This is 9 hours longer than the time the FOIA requires a sub-central public body to spend in complying with a request. You should note that, for future requests, we will take this into account in estimating how long it will take to comply with a request and, as such, we may in future ask that similar requests are more narrow in scope.”

RFI 096 took the SSRO a total of 27 hours with which to comply, and covered meetings attended by 4 SSRO employees over a period of 12 months. The SSRO estimates it will take 20.25 hours to comply with RFI 100, based on the following adjustments being made:

• 4 employees adjusted to 3 employees ((27 hours/4) x 3) = 20.25 hours

This estimate of 20.25 hours to comply with your present request exceeds the cost limit equivalent of 18 hours. This estimate does not take into account information held outside of MS Outlook calendars (such as in emails or Sharepoint) and nor does it take account of information held by the organisation centrally outside of personal accounts or devices.   Without knowing the purpose for which you requested the information it is difficult for us to provide specific advice on the formulation of a less costly information request, and it remains the case that a more limited information request might also be subject to exemptions from disclosure under the FOIA. Should you wish to submit a new (similar) information request, on or after 18 November, you might consider further limiting this in a number of ways, for example:

• seeking only information held by a smaller group of SSRO representatives;
• seeking only information covering a shorter time period; or
• seeking only information based on the use of key words.

We note that you disagree with the SSRO’s reference to RFI 096 as an appropriate benchmark for estimating the time it will take to comply with RFI 100 on the basis, you say, that the number of meetings involved will be “considerably smaller”. First, it is not immediately obvious to the SSRO that the number of meetings involved would be considerably smaller, including because the number of trade body representatives you have provided (fourteen) is considerably larger than the number of SSAT representatives covered by RFI 096. Second, and in any event, the vast majority of the time expended by SSRO personnel in complying with RFI 096 was attributed to locating the information within individual Outlook calendars. This entailed those SSRO personnel reviewing, for every working day over a 12-month period, every meeting within their calendar to make a preliminary assessment of whether it may be within scope of the request. That exercise would need to be undertaken regardless of the actual number of meetings that are ultimately determined to be within scope of the request. We have already suggested to you that one way in which to make this search strategy more efficient and less time-consuming would be to seek only information based on the use of key words (which could be used to run a search), but you have chosen not to do so. This may be something you wish to give further thought to if submitting a new information request on or after 18 November.

If you are not satisfied with this response, you have the right to ask for an internal review. Internal review requests should be submitted within 40 working days and should be addressed to: [email protected]. If you are not content with the outcome of the internal review, you have the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. Details of how to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office are available at https://ico.org.uk/global/privacy-notice/how-you-can-contact-us/.