FOI - Private sector buildings with non-ACM cladding [Jun 2023]

Your request

An anonymised list of private sector buildings with non-ACM cladding (cladding in the 
Building Safety Fund (BSF)), which had full approval from the BSF (by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC)), to include: 

• Anonymised building numbers (for example, No.1, 2, 3, etc)
• Application submission date (not the initial registration date)
• The date of full application approval
• Local Authority
• Remediation progress (Started, Complete awaiting Building Control, Complete)

Our response

Our response to your request is contained within Annex A (attached).

Unfortunately, we have estimated that the cost of complying with part of 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 Freedom of Information Act 2000 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.

Regarding request number two, there are multiple application submissions throughout an 
application process that take place after the initial registration date. It is unfortunately not 
reasonably achievable to identify, within the aforementioned cost limit, the specific submission that corresponds to a full application. A submission date isn’t time stamped in a clean place for us to review, and it would require a manual review of all 108 applications in that feature in the response. 

We have estimated that it would take at least 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.

We have therefore refused this part of your request under the cost limit provisions of section 12 of the Act and this letter therefore constitutes a refusal notice under section 17(1) of the Act.

The GLA administers the government BSF in London. If information is required in relation to any buildings outside of London, the request should be made to DLUHC or Homes England, who might hold the information respectively. 
 
If you have any further questions relating to this matter, please contact us, quoting 
reference MGLA230623-0443.