Key information
Request reference number: MGLA070725-9447
Date of response:
Summary of request
Your request
Could you advise for each the last 3 financial years (2022/23, 2023/24 & 2024/25) How much the London Mayor Office has spent on:
- Easter activities
- St Georges Day activities
- May day activities
- St Andrew's Day activities
- St David's Day activities
- St Patrick's day activities
- Eid/Ramadan & other Muslim celebration days/activities
- Divali & other Hindu celebration days/activities
- Hanukkah/Passover/Yom Kippur & other Jewish celebration days/activities
- Sikh celebration days/activities
- Buddhist celebration days/activities
- Chinese New Year
- Halloween
- Bonfire night/Guy Fawkes activities
- Black History Month
- Black on the Square
- Notting Hill Carnival
- Pride Month
- Christmas activities
- New Year's Eve/New Years Day activities
- Refugee week
How much did Mayor of London office make in money from activities for the same period(s) it put on for the aforementioned? (Money made back could refer to revenue for ticketed events, how much vendors paid to set up stalls at these events official merchandise etc)
How many people are employed in the London Mayor Office EDI department? (or if its known by a different name then please supply this information)
How much is the head of EDI (or equivalent) paid?
How much is paid to the EDI department (or equivalent) as a whole?
When was the department set up?
Provide year on year (as far back as you have this information) How many staff have been employed in EDI?
Provide year on year (As far back as you have this information) the total spend on EDI staff
Our response
A lot of the information you are seeking is already published:
We receive a significant volume of requests relating the costs of specific events. Where requests have been successful, named events have been specified for us to locate and retrieve information against. We publish our responses on our Disclosure Log, therefore some of the information you require is already publicly available, for example;
FOI - Costs of the Trafalgar Square Oslo tree [Oct 2022] | London City Hall
FOI - Feast of St George event | London City Hall
FOI - London Mela [May 2025] | London City Hall
FOI - Pride [Jul 2024] | London City Hall – (includes link to Mayoral Decision for Pride funding)
FOI - Eid Celebrations in Trafalgar Square [May 2024] | London City Hall
FOI - Expenditure on Ramadan and Easter [April 2024] | London City Hall
FOI - St Patrick's Day Festival 2022 [Mar 2022] | London City Hall
FOI - Divali Festival on Trafalgar Square [Nov 2022] | London City Hall
FOI - New Year's Eve 2023 [Sep 2024] | London City Hall
The GLA does not ticket or charge for events as a rule; but there is a ticketing system for New Year’s Eve broadly designed to cover the cost of the ticket implementation and management (details in relevant Mayoral decision documents): MD2757 New Year’s Eve 2021, 2022 and 2023 | London City Hall
We also publish expenditure which is committed against events within our Decision making framework, for example; MD3351 Community Events Programme 2025-26 to 2027-28 | London City Hall
If you perform a search on our website for any previous events of interest and then use the filter to the right of your browser by ‘page type’ / ‘decisions’, you will see a list of the relevant authorised budget documentation.
EDI Roles:
GLA salary scales are published on our website: Salaries, expenses, benefits and workforce information | London City Hall
Unfortunately, we have 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 several teams at the GLA that your request would need to be circulated amongst in order to locate and extract information in relation to (For example, Events, Facilities Management, Regeneration, Culture). To define expenditure which would fall within the scope of a particular ‘activity’ is a very wide definition and could include various residual expenditure. For example, there may also be grant funding which would involve fringe activity which could be determined as falling within the scope of a particular ‘activity’ (for example London Borough of Culture). Some of the named events are not information we would hold information against (for example, Halloween and Bonfire Night).
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 30 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.
If you require any further information, you may wish to limit your request to specific named events that have been supported by the GLA as seen within the requests on our Disclosure log. Please note any narrowed request will be treated as a new request for information for consideration under the Act.