Request

I wish to make an FOI request regarding Immigration Health Surcharge reimbursements (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/immigration-health-surcharge-applying-for-a-refund/immigration-health-surcharge-guidance-for-reimbursement-2020)

Please can you tell me the total amount in payments made by the NHSBSA from 11 December 2021. I note that in IR-FOI-03514, it is conveyed that such information is available without the need from manual review, from this date onwards (with cases prior to 10 December 2021 being stored in a way that would require manual review.)

Response

I can confirm that the NHSBSA holds information meeting with the description specified in your request. However, I estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450.

To clarify, the exemption applies to all cases. The 1,560 cases requiring investigation are not due to data not being recorded prior to 10/12/2021. Providing data after this date does not resolve the issue requiring manual interrogation of our records.

The estimate remains as follows:

We initiate the reimbursement for the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) reimbursement scheme through the Home Office’s UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) payment portal in 6- month blocks. The UKVI system automatically calculates the reimbursement amount, which is then manually recorded on the NHSBSA customer’s case file.

Please be advised that reimbursement data was not recorded by the NHSBSA from within the UKVI payment portal prior to 10 December 2021. There are 1,560 cases which would require manual extraction to identify if the information requested is held. Please note that each claim may include up to one applicant receiving reimbursement along with any number of dependents, each would need to be assessed individually.

To investigate the 1,560 cases, it would require a manual check of each case history to identify the reimbursement amount generated in the UKVI payment portal against the reimbursement data recorded within our records management system. This would take an estimated total of five minutes to assess.

As cases are closed in our records management system, an additional IT request is needed to re-open the case and then the data will need to be input manually to the case record.

This would take a further five minutes, making a total of ten minutes to check each applicable case.

Please see the following calculation which sets out the estimated cost for compliance with this request: 1,560 cases × 10 minutes per case to extract and retrieve = 15,600 minutes (260 hours estimate)

This exceeds the statutory cost limit of 18 hours, and section 12 therefore applies.

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 and extracting the information.

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 is available at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244/contents/made

Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, the NHSBSA is not obliged to comply with your request and I am writing to advise that we will not be processing your request further.

Advice and assistance

Please be advised that due to the way that the information is held by the NHSBSA, it is not possible to submit a refined request under the appropriate limit.