Key information
Request reference number: MGLA250523-8332
Date of response:
Summary of request
Your request
A list of individual developments for affordable housing starts across London for each
quarter between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023, in line with the Mayor's public statement that
work started on 25,658 affordable homes last year.
Our response
The GLA has estimated that the cost of complying with your request in full would exceed the 'appropriate limit' specified in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.
Section 12 of the Act provides that a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request if the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and
extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. The aforementioned
Fees Regulations stipulate that this limit is £450; calculated at £25 per hour for every hour
spent on the activities described and equates to 18 hours of work.
There are approximately 150 members of staff at the GLA whom your request would need to be coordinated with, and further officers within our delivery partner organisations. There is no mechanism at our disposal to perform an automated review of the relevant information related to each project that contribute towards the affordable housing reported statistics and each project record would need to be reviewed by Area Teams.
There are over 1,800 individual schemes that contribute towards the starts on site outturn for 2022-23 and we estimate that it would be likely to take each individual at least 5 to 10 minutes to perform reviews and confirm with the delivery partner. There are c.86 individual delivery partners and we estimate that it would take at least 10 minutes for our officers to contact each partner to review the information.
We have therefore refused this request under the cost limit provisions of section 12 of the
Freedom of Information Act and this letter therefore constitutes a refusal notice under section 17(1) of the Act.
We have estimated that it would take at least 20 working days (at 7.5 hours per day) to comply with your request as a significant amount of time would be needed to retrieve and extract the specific information you have requested from our records, including separating it from other information which is not directly related to your request.
In order to bring your request within the cost threshold, you may wish to limit your request to particular named organisations and the volume of homes they have started on site, or focus on specific borough locations in London to narrow down the scope of your request.
Alternatively, if there is a specific tenure focus or programme level information, the GLA may be able to provide more details.
Please note any narrowed request will be treated as a new request for information for consideration under the Act.
If you have any further questions relating to this matter, please contact us, quoting
reference MGLA250523-8332.