External consultants and training firms
Case reference FOI2024/01633
Received 25 September 2024
Published 22 October 2024
Request
Response
Please can you provide me with the spend by your organisation on external consultants and training firms in the previous 12 months or the most recent 12-month period for which the data is available.
Please break down the spend by type of consultancy service or training service provided.
Answer: 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 accounting systems is unable to run a report for this information in the level of detail requested. To ascertain the data requested officers would need to manually check each record of spend by Herefordshire Council on external consultants and training firms, contacting relevant budget holders to ascertain the type of consultancy service or training service provided. An initial search has shown that 1,800 lines of spend would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take 5 minutes per line to check the relevant budget holder, contact them and for them to locate the details of the expenditure in question.
Once the details had been identified this would need to be noted and once all lines had been checked in this way, the information would need to be collatated.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 150 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.
The Service Area have provided me with the spreadsheet containing all spend by your organisation on external consultants and training firms, however this includes several areas of expenditure that are not necessarily relevant to your request, such as temporary staff, agency staff and training provided to external parties and not necessarily just training for HC staff. If you would like to refine your request to more specific areas of spend, for example which type of consultant you wish to see expenditure for, or all spend on corporate all staff training from external training companies, or for a certain service area, then this would be something we may be able to provide within the time limit.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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