FOI Review - Review of 101003833876 Expense Claims for Elected Members
Request 101003849794
Review of 101003833876 Expense Claims for Elected Members
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.
Response 02-10-2025
Following your request for a review (our ref: 101003849794) of your Freedom of Information (FOI) Request – Expense Claims for Elected Members (our ref: 101003833876) - a review meeting was held on 29th September 2025. In attendance were the Information Governance Manager and Data Protection Officer, Assistant Payroll Manager, Solicitor, and Information Co-ordinator.
Your FOI Request (101003833876) from 7th August 2025 was discussed.
The review panel found that, when we collated the information for your initial request, a more experienced member of staff estimated the time needed to gather the information as 49 hours. For your subsequent FOI request, a different officer in the same team assessed for it to be more time-consuming, resulting in the discrepancy you flagged up.
In your review request you express your astonishment about the time needed to retrieve information and an assumption that the information was held electronically. We confirm that only some of the information is held electronically, namely the members’ accounts; this information is published and the link was given in our original response. However, expense claims are still only held in hard copied forms, and this is part of the reason why it would take so long to check, transcribe and record the required details for each individual elected member’s claim.
The system for processing councillors’ expense claims is currently being reviewed, with a view to change it to a fully electronic method. Had this already been in place then it would likely have enabled us to fulfil such FOI requests in a shorter amount of time. However, there is no date yet for this to be completed.
We uphold our original response of and maintain that the information requested is indeed exempt under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 - excessive cost.