FOI - GLA funding agreement with Brent Council [Oct 2021]

Your request

1. How did GLA make gift disbursements when the monitoring, accounting and other
conditions were apparently not met? 

2. Can GLA publish all the reports, correspondence, communications etc from Brent Council (BC) that were submitted from the time of signing 3 April 2019 agreement?

3. If BC makes sub grants, is BC required to comply with terms in the agreement with GLA or not? If yes, should those terms be in their agreement with the
receivers of sub grant or not?

4. How did GLA ensure that BC met all the conditions or did GLA accept whatever was filed
in claim form? Can I please get copies of all the claim forms submitted by BC?

5. Excerpts presented from BC’s replies in a FOI request said that Metroland is independent (not BC) and BC did not monitor expenses. In light of their answer what action will GLA take to ascertain as to how were then sub grants made and how did they meet all the terms and conditions of the agreement?

Our response

1. Brent Council entered into a milestone related funding agreement with the GLA and as suchwas monitored against the fulfilment of project objectives through meeting milestones.
Some milestones were rescheduled following signing of the contract due to the impacts of
COVID-19 on delivery.

2. Unfortunately, we have estimated that the cost of complying would exceed the “appropriate limit” specified in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) 2000.

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.

We estimate that we hold more than 500 items of correspondence which fall within scope of
this part of your request.

Several GLA officers were in regular weekly contact with Brent Council over the course of two years and have a whole range of emails and documents that were
exchanged over that period.

We also had to work with Brent Council as they remodelled their programme during the pandemic and this involved vast amounts of correspondence too. It is unclear to what extent all the information requested would be of value. Due to the nature of correspondence, we would need to spend a significant amount of time reviewing these emails in detail to separate out information relevant to your request.

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 over 18 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 are considering narrowing down the scope of your request, please consider providing
more context to what specific information you want in relation to the topic of the
communications you wish to receive, narrowing the timeframe of your request, specifying
the nature of any documents you wish to receive. Please note any narrowed request will be
treated as a new request for information for consideration under the Act.

3. Brent Council was required to comply with the terms of its funding agreement with the GLA. Brent Council entered into its own agreements with sub-grantees.

4. Please find attached the claim forms that were submitted against the delivery of project
milestones. The GLA, Brent Council and Metroland Cultures, as the delivery mechanism for
the project, met on a regular basis throughout the planning and delivery stages of the
programme to ensure the project milestones were achieved and conditions were met.

5. Brent Council entered into its own agreements with sub-grantees. The GLA, Brent Council and Metroland Cultures, as the delivery mechanism for the project, met on a regular basis throughout the planning and delivery stages of the programme to ensure the project milestones were achieved and the terms and conditions were met. 

If you have any further questions relating to this matter, please contact me, quoting reference MGLA290921-4146.