I refer to your request under the Freedom of Information Act, which I received on 26 June 2024 for information about the following:

Could you also provide me with details of the department or individual I need to contact to give me information on how many appeals you have received over the last 12 months and how many you have overturned and upheld.

Response

I am writing to advise you that following a search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the specific information you requested is not held by the NHS Business Services Authority.

With regards to the total appeals received over the last 12 months, please be advised that we are issuing a refusal notice under section 17 of the FOIA.

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 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:

In order to confirm if this is the case, it would require reviewing the case notes on ach record to identify if an appeal was made.

There are 136,018 cases recorded on our system whereby a contact has been made which may be an appeal. We estimate that it would take approximately 3 minutes to review each a case. As such, the total estimated time it would take to comply with this request is 6,800.9 hours.

In accordance with the duty to advise and assist under section 16 of the FOIA 2000, please be advised that any subsequent request may be subject to applicable exemptions under the FOIA.

For cases that have successfully been ‘overturned’, we are able to provide the total number of cases where the exemption was confirmed and cancelled as below:

From Case Start Date - 10/07/2023

To Case Start Date - 05/07/2024

Exemption Confirmed and Cancelled - 39,960