On 20/01/2012 17:06, paul perrin wrote:
Thank you, I saw that post and thought the fact it was an 'external supplier' would by pass the £25 an hour limit - but reading the PDF, it clearly says that they must cost at that rate too - I will follow this up directly.
I would have thought, though, that it depends on what exactly is being charged for by the third party supplier.
If the authority asks a third party to carry out some work to retrieve information and is told "We can do that for you at our standard hourly rate of £100 per hour; we estimate it will take 8 working hours to complete" then the authority has to calculate that at £25 an hour and absorb the difference. But if the third party says "We can do that for you; our flat-rate fee for this type of work is £800 per request", then the authority can decline to pay it and tell the FOI requester that the cost is too great.
To give a possible real life example: If the information could only be retrieved by using data recovery techniques on a disk from which the information had previously been deleted then such a request could almost certainly be refused on cost grounds even though it would take a data recovery firm only a few hours of actual working time to do it. In such a case, the fee paid to the data recovery firm is not simply an hourly rate, it's an overall project fee.
Mark -- Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine 2 http://mark.goodge.co.uk _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
