GHF-E106-R55 — Llandough Community Council section 12 refusal, 11 October 2026
11 October 2026 — Llandough Community Council reply to the 21 September request. Original email file not attached; the transcription below preserves the substantive reply text. Postal address, telephone details, standard footer and quoted earlier message are omitted.
Dear Mr Buckler, Thank you for your email of 21 September 2026 making a request for information. We are treating your correspondence as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the act). Under the provisions of the act and as defined by "The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004" (the regulations) , an authority is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the "appropriate limit". This appropriate limit is set by the regulations at £450 for our type of authority. In the regulations our staff time is valued at £25 per hour. This has the effect of imposing a time limit of 18 hours of staff time for activities specified in the regulations. The regulations make the following activities by an authority countable towards the cost limit. * determining whether it holds the information, * locating the information, or a document which may contain the information, * retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the information, and * extracting the information from a document containing it. We have estimated the time and therefore costs as provided by the regulations, and in doing so have taken into account the above activities. We estimate that this work will take in excess of 18 hours of effort by our staff. As we have a significant amount of documents on file from the period 2002-2016 where minutes are in documents rather than published on the website or in archives. We estimate this will exceed the limit provided for by the regulations and therefore your request is refused on the grounds provided for under section 12 of the act. Our estimate of time is based on the requirement to search all minutes of the council and its committees for a period of 14 years. It is estimated that it will take about 20 minutes to read each set of minutes of which there are estimated to 224 sets of minutes. It is considered that this is likely to take about 10 minutes to assess each set of minutes a total of over 2240 minutes which equates to 37 hours. We may may be able to provide some information if you are able to reduce or refine your request to bring the cost of compliance under the regulations limit. We suggest that you could limit the time frame of minutes that we would need to look through. For example 2002-2006. Please contact us if you would like to refine your request. If you are not satisfied with this response or you wish to complain about any aspect of the handling of your request, then you should contact us in the first instance and we will undertake an internal review. If after the internal review you wish to complain further then you can complain to the Information Commissioners Office http://www.ico.gov.uk [1] and request a decision notice. The other matters you include in your email will be considered at the October meeting of the council and I will let you have the views of the council after the meeting. Kind regards, Paul R. Egan BA, Chartered MCIPD, CiLCA, F. Inst. LM, FIPSM Clerk to Llandough Community Council [Postal address, telephone details, standard privacy footer and quoted earlier message omitted.]
Interpretation
The estimate says 224 sets of minutes, at 20 minutes to read and 10 minutes to assess each. If both activities apply to every set, the total is 6,720 minutes (112 hours). The stated “over 2240 minutes” equals the assessment component alone.
The refusal invokes section 12 FOIA. It does not separately state an outcome for photographs/images or records of the 1982 transfer/deposit, and it does not separately explain how the environmental-information part was assessed.
Related records: GHF-E170 — request and refusal thread · R53 · R54.