Key information
Request reference number: MGLA050324-8086
Date of response:
Summary of request
Your request
This is an information request relating to the Night Tsar and their team. Please include the following information:
- What is the total budget for Amy Lame’s team?
- Of this budget, what is the total staffing budget?
- How many people work in Amy Lame’s team?
- How many meetings with external organisations or individuals have Amy Lame’s team had since the beginning of the current calendar year? Please list the meetings including who they were with
- What are the key performance indicators for Amy Lame’s team? For the 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24, have these been achieved? Please provide what each KPI is and whether they’ve been achieved for each year listed. If KPIs have changed please make this clear.
Our response
1. There is no direct team budget. There is a budget within the Culture and Creative Industries Unit that supports the work on 24 Hour London. This programme budget is 233k in the financial year 23-24.
2. The staffing budget for the 3 permanent members of staff who work on 24 Hour London programme is £201k for 23/24.
3. Please see response to question 2. All GLA Executive Directors, Deputy Mayor’s and Special Appointments are also supported by the Executive Support Office.
4. 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.
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 4 members of staff at the GLA whom your request would need to be coordinated with. There is no mechanism at our disposal to perform an automated search for relevant information. We have estimated an average of 4 external meetings a day (sometimes more) across about 50 working days for the time frame specified, so if we average at 4 meetings per day. The details of 200 meetings will need to be reviewed through a combination of Outlook calendar invites and background meeting administration emails and meeting notes to produce a list of the external organisations or individuals you have requested. It is likely to take everyone between 10 - 20 minutes to perform searches against each meeting which is beyond the 18-hour threshold.
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. In order to bring your request within the cost threshold, you may wish to limit your request to specific named individuals / organisations that the Night Czar and the 24-Hour team have met that we can perform searches against. Please note any narrowed request will be treated as a new request for information for consideration under the Act.
5. Key performance indicators: