David,

Section 9A of the DPA was one of the amendments to the DPA contained in 
the FOI Act 2000. The amendments added a new category of personal data, 
which is unstructured personal data held by public authorities. So in fact 
what this means is that people have more access to their personal data 
from public authorities than from the private sector. 

The fee chargeable is still a maximum of £10 for SARs (barring the usual 
exceptions - education records, etc), no matter what the organisation. The 
appropriate limit of £600/£450 doesn't refer to any charge that can be 
made. What Section 9A states is if responding to a request for 
unstructured personal data would cost more than £600/£450 of staff time, 
the authority is not obliged to comply with the request. The staff time 
must be calculated at £25 per hour, and it is only staff time for: 
determining whether it holds the information; locating the information; 
retrieving the information; and extracting the information from a document 
containing it. To reiterate, no charge can be made for this staff time, it 
is purely for the purpose of calculating whether or not the authority is 
obliged to comply with the request.

Hope this helps.

Kind Regards,
Peter



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Subject:        [data-protection] FOI and DPA Fees

FOI and DPA Upper limit costs

http://www.hmso.gov.uk/si/si2004/20043244.htm

Extract of Explanatory note

These Regulations prescribe "the appropriate amount" for the purposes of 
section 9A of the Data Protection Act 1998 and section 12 of the Freedom 
of Information Act 2000. If a public authority estimates that the cost of 
complying with a request for the information to which either of those 
provisions applies would exceed the appropriate amount, then the 
obligations which would otherwise be imposed by section 7 of the 1998 Act 
and section 1 of the 2000 Act in respect of such requests for information 
do not apply.

Regulation 3 prescribes an appropriate limit of £600 in the case of the 
public bodies listed in Part I of Schedule 1 to the 2000 Act (including 
government departments). An appropriate limit of £450 is prescribed in 
relation to all other public authorities.

-----

1: Can anyone advise me of the the order which created section 9A in the 
Data Protection Act refered to in the above. It was not in the original 
Act so must have been a later amendment. 

Seems an inbalance in data subjects rights with public authorities getting 
a potential opportunity to charge increased fees which will  discourage 
requests over and above those fees private sector organisation are 
permitted to charge. Why are personal data recovery costs different by 
sector? 

2: Any views on this? (Am I misreading)

David Wyatt

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