FOI Review - Review of 101003833876 Expense Claims for Elected Members

Request 101003849794

I am writing to request a review of your response to FOI request, Reference: 101003833876.

In July 2025, I requested the same information as in the above (Request 101003816026), for an eight-year period (2017 – 2025). My request was refused one grounds of excessive cost. The response estimated that it would take approximately 49 hours to break down the information as requested which, I concede, exceeds the £600/40-hour cap under The Freedom of Information (Fees for Required Disclosure) (Scotland) Regulations 2004, although I have my doubts about whether information (presumably) held in electronic form in accounting software could possibly take so long to interrogate.

I therefore revised my request and resubmitted it. Accepting that there will be a degree of overhead time in the provision of such information, I requested less than half the amount of information requested previously: a three-year period (2022-2025). This request was also refused, this time on the basis that this information would take in excess of 40 hours to collate.

It is inconceivable that collating less than half of the information previously requested would take almost the same amount of time to collate.