Veterans on a social housing waiting list since the start of the financial year 2018/19
Case reference FOI2024/01927
Received 18 November 2024
Published 17 December 2024
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please can you provide me with the following information on veterans and social housing in your local authority:
1. The number of veterans that were on a social housing waiting list in your local authority, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
2. The average length of time spent by a veteran on a social housing waiting list in your local authority, since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
3. The longest time a veteran has spent on a social housing waiting list in your local authority since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
4. The number of complaints made by veterans in social housing about their social housing provision to your local authority, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
5. The number of veterans that contacted your local authority asking for financial support of any kind in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19.
Response
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please can you provide me with the following information on veterans and social housing in your local authority:
1. The number of veterans that were on a social housing waiting list in your local authority, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
2. The average length of time spent by a veteran on a social housing waiting list in your local authority, since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
3. The longest time a veteran has spent on a social housing waiting list in your local authority since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
4. The number of complaints made by veterans in social housing about their social housing provision to your local authority, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
5. The number of veterans that contacted your local authority asking for financial support of any kind in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19.
Answer: Regarding the first 3 questions of your request, this information is not currently 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 cannot currently run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested officers would need to manually check all applications for this information. An initial search has shown that there will have been around 2,325 veterans that were on a social housing waiting list since 2018 to date which would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take 3.5 minutes to check each file.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 135.6 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 advised that they would be able to answer question 4 of your request, relating to the number of complaints made by veterans in social housing about their social housing provision, within the time limit. Please let me know if you would like this information. Please note the information requested in question 5 is not held by Herefordshire Council.
Furthermore, the Service Area have advised that they are in the process of transferring their data into a format that would be more easily reportable, but they have advised that they don’t have an exact time frame of when this will be done. I would advise to resubmit this request in 3 months, and I can check to see if we have the data available.
Documents
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