Request

Under The Freedom of Information Act 2000, I would like to request a copy of all correspondence relating to the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS),

1) between the DWP and the NHSBSA from November 2020 to current date

2) between the NHSBSA and all Ministers and members of parliament including the PrimeMinister from November 2020 to current date

3) between the NHSBSA and Crawfords medical assessors from the start of Crawfords contract to current date

Your request was received on 13 October 2022 and has been dealt with under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Response

To locate and extract the information requested, NHSBSA staff would need to conduct a manual examination of –

• Individual claimant files (currently over 2700 files)

• All correspondence received in the VDPS and VDPS enquiries mailboxes

• Inboxes and sent items of staff within the Leadership & Management, Customer Resolutions Team, Communications and Parliamentary Questions teams

Working on an extremely optimistic timeframe of five minutes to examine each of the individual case files only, this would bring the total time taken to a minimum 225 hours (or 30 days). In addition, the likely time taken for the staff and team mailboxes search is not possible to calculate clearly, however it would substantially increase the above timeframe even further.

The cost of complying with your request would therefore 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 18.5 hours (or 2.5 days) in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information and then locating, retrieving and extracting it.

In accordance with section 12 of the Act, the NHSBSA is not obliged to comply with your request because the cost incurred in providing a response to your enquiry would exceed the appropriate limit – therefore we will not process your request as it stands.

Where a request falls within the scope of section 12 of the Act, it is possible to revisit that request if it is rephrased sufficiently to allow us to locate and collect the information within the appropriate limit. This can sometimes be achieved by narrowing the timeframe or making the subject matter more specific – though we cannot always guarantee this because all FoIA requests are processed on an individual case basis.

Should you be able to alter your request in a way which would allow us to comply within the appropriate limit, we will endeavour to do so. Please note that if we do not receive such clarification within two months from the date of this letter, we will consider your request as closed.

Please note that this request and our response is published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-27759

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data, please contact nhsbsa.foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data, please contact nhsbsa.communicationsteam@nhs.net. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the statement “NHSBSA Copyright 2022”. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/) – failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.

Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.