The authority must be specific about costs. Time must always be charged at £25/hour: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244/regulation/4/made
They do not apply to time spent: checking whether exemptions apply advising and assisting you copying the information putting it your preferred format, for example, scanning delivering it to you, for example by post or email Redaction if applicable Other costs such as postage and copying can be included, but they must be 'reasonable'. Although ‘reasonable’ is not defined, the Department for Constitutional Affairs guidelines say that printing and photocopying should not normally be charged at more than 10 pence per sheet. And as I say, it can only calculate the cost of copying etc, not the time it takes to copy. On 23 Jan 2012, at 08:49, Mark Goodge <[email protected]> wrote: > 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/colm%40truthmonkey.org
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