Key information
Request reference number: MGLA180423-5174
Date of response:
Summary of request
Our response
Under the terms of the Capital Funding Guide (CFG) housing associations who receive funding for shared ownership must determine the value of a property using a RICS surveyor. Social media posts have indicated that the GLA has ruled in a stage 2 complaint response that where a housing association believes that a valuation is flawed that they may reject it and either compel the leaseholder to get another one or offer to negotiate the value without the involvement of a RICs surveyor.
Is the above true? Has the GLA made such a determination in a stage 2 complaint? I am not looking for any further details a simple 'yes' or 'no' will suffice but please add detail if you believe it is required to answer the question.
We can neither confirm nor deny whether the GLA holds information within the scope
of your request. The duty to confirm or deny in Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 does not apply when considered along with the following exemption provisions:
- Section 40 (Personal information).
- Section 40 (5B)(a)(i) provides an exemption from the duty to confirm or deny whether requested information is held, if the act of confirming or denying would disclose personal data.
- (5B) The duty to confirm or deny does not arise in relation to other information if or to the extent that any of the following applies—
(a) giving a member of the public the confirmation or denial that would have to be
given to comply with section 1(1)(a)—
(i) would (apart from this Act) contravene any of the data protection principles, or
(ii) would do so if the exemptions in section 24(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018 (manual
unstructured data held by public authorities) were disregarded;
The GLA is not obliged to confirm or deny the circumstances relating to a third party, if giving the confirmation or denial would contravene the data protection principles. Such a statement would contravene the first data protection principle under Article 5(1) of UK GDPR which states that personal data must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject.
This exemption provision is absolute, and we are not required to assess the public interest
considerations in relying on s.40(5B)(a)(i).
It is further alleged that the GLA accepted that the valuation was flawed having never seen the actual valuation and simply trusted that the housing association was telling the truth. Is it the policy of the GLA to accept the word of a housing association and not require evidence that a valuation is flawed when investigating possible breaches of the CFG?
How many housing associations have been discovered by the GLA to have breached the CFG ever? How many such investigations have ever been launched?
The purpose of Compliance Audit (CA) is to ensure that the GLA’s contractual requirements are adhered to. Lead partners are required to commission independent procedural compliance audits. Breaches identified through the CA process are investigated by the auditor and Area Managers.
Unfortunately, we have estimated that the cost of complying with your request 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.
The information you are seeking would involve locating and retrieving information from
decades worth of files.
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 50 hours of work 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 by introducing a time frame for which you want us to search under. The more recent the time frame, the more likely we will be able to retrieve the information within the scope of your request within the acceptable time threshold Please note any narrowed request will be treated as a new request for information for consideration under the Act.
Is it the policy of the GLA to fully investigate allegations of breaches to the CFG made by the public and, if so, what would constitute an investigation?
For example, do you collect evidence (emails, valuations etc) or do you simply ask the housing association if they breached the regulations and if they say 'no' close the case?
A breach of the CFG, if reported by a member of the public, would be considered on a case by case basis.
It is not a subject of CA to consider allegations of breaches to the CFG made by the public.
If you have any further questions relating to this matter, please contact us, quoting
reference MGLA180423-5174.