Request

Thank you again for the information you provided in fulfilment of FOI reference FOI-02957 supplied on 23/07/2025.

I have now received responses and data from over 600 public bodies. Many have, without prompting, included additional fields beyond those originally requested, which add helpful context to late payment data.

I’m writing to ask whether any of the following fields (or similar) are already available within your system, and if so, whether you could add them to the dataset you previously provided under FOI reference FOI-02957 supplied on 23/07/2025.

Providing the date you received the invoice would be a really useful addition as would any of the other examples below:

· Invoice due date

· Invoice approved date

· Invoice payment terms

· Invoice query/dispute flag (e.g. Y/N)

· Reason for invoice query/dispute/delay

I want to emphasise that I do not wish to create any additional work. I’m only asking for this information if it already exists in your system and can be exported easily alongside the information you’ve already supplied.

If these fields are available and can be shared, I’d be very grateful if you could provide them (even if this means treating it as a new request). If not, please just let me know and I’ll make a note — there’s no need to take any further action.

Response

The NHSBSA does hold the requested information; however, we estimate that the cost of compliance with the request would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12 of the FOIA.

We estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244/contents/made and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving, extracting and checking the information.

Please see the following calculations which sets out the estimated cost for compliance with this request:

We would need to manually review approximately 4,500 files to locate and extract the requested information.

Assuming an average of 1 minute per file (although in practice this could take longer), this equates to:

4,500 files × 1 minute per file = 4,500 minutes (approximately 75 hours)

Please note that this is an estimate based on the assumption of 1 minute per file. The actual time required may be greater depending on the complexity of each file.