Veterans at risk of homelessness
Case reference FOI2024/01928
Received 18 November 2024
Published 16 December 2024
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please can you provide me with the following information on veterans at risk of homelessness in your local authority:
The number of households in which a veteran is registered as living that have been at risk of homelessness in your local authority, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19; The number of households in which a veteran is registered as living that have been at risk of homelessness in your local authority due to a Section 21 notice, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
The number of households in which a veteran is registered as living that are currently (as of November 2024) at risk of homelessness in your local authority. If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under the Section 16 obligations of the Act, as to how I can refine my request.
Response
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please can you provide me with the following information on veterans at risk of homelessness in your local authority:
The number of households in which a veteran is registered as living that have been at risk of homelessness in your local authority, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19; The number of households in which a veteran is registered as living that have been at risk of homelessness in your local authority due to a Section 21 notice, in each month since the start of the financial year 2018/19;
The number of households in which a veteran is registered as living that are currently (as of November 2024) at risk of homelessness in your local authority. If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under the Section 16 obligations of the Act, as to how I can refine my request.
A: Regarding the first 2 parts 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 can not 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 4000 homelessness applications received 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 233 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 the third part of your request, relating to the number of households in which a veteran is registered as living that are currently (as of November 2024) at risk of homelessness, within the time limit. Please let me know if you would like this information. Furthermore, they 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
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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