Child social service users transported by social workers own personal vehicles
Case reference FOI2025/00662
Received 27 March 2025
Published 11 April 2025
Request
Response
How many child social service users have been transported by social workers own personal vehicles from midnight 22nd december 2024 to midnight 29th december 2024, 7 days.
A: As with your previous, similar request, this information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information, as we are not able to search under the parametres of the request. I appreciate you have refined your request to a smaller timeframe, but officers would still need to manually check children’s files for this information to see if the child social care users have been transported during that week, and if so by what means. An initial search has shown that currently, there are 1015 cases open to Social Care, which would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take 5 minutes to check each file to see if the child has been transported by social workers own personal vehicles during that specific week of December 2024.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 84.5 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
Furthermore, the Service Area have advised that whether a child has been transported in a Social Workers vehicle is not routinely recorded on their notes, so even if a manual trawl was undertaken of each case, it would not be an accurate record of whether or not the transport was via a certain method.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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