Hi Andrew,
I don't think this guidance affects the use of section 12 at all - this guidance note is only relating to how you calculate the fee you're going to charge if you were to use section 13 and issue a fees notice.
You still calculate the cost of complying with a request as you did before, and you can still refuse it under section 12 as you did before.
You definitely do not have to spend time on a request up to the limit, if you know that it will exceed the limit - page 8 of this guidance states this explicitly: http://ico.org.uk/for_organisations/guidance_index/~/media/documents/library/Freedom_of_Information/Detailed_specialist_guides/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf
("A public authority is not obliged to search up to the appropriate limit.")
We've never been able to include the time spent redacting information as part of our estimate of how long it would take to comply with a request - it has only ever been location, extraction, etc.
Regards,
Peter
Peter Dinsdale
Information Security Officer (Compliance)
Tel: 0191 208 6950
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Goodfellow-Swaap [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 04 June 2014 15:59
To: [log in to unmask]; Peter Dinsdale
Subject: Re: New ICO Guidance - Cost of redaction
Hi Peter,
We used to issue fees notices but stopped when it became very clear that no-one, ever, wanted to pay (I think we had one person pay the fee in my first 5 years in this job). So we just stuck to s.12.
Redaction time was never taken into consideration.
Unfortunately, what this seems to do now is mean that even if we know something will take over the limit (because our experience tells us that there will be substantial redacting required) we have to spend that time doing it anyway up to the limit.
The guidance is very clear that redaction time cannot be included in the estimate but can be included for the cost of communicating.
Pg 5. "A public authority can also charge for the time it takes a member of staff to actually redact the exempt information. This cost can be included because it is part of the costs of communicating the information under regulation 7."
So we end up in the situation where, instead of us being able to use s.12, we have requesters simply refusing to pay the disbursement cost.
Andrew
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