FOI release

FOI2021/00057: Smart Grants Aug 2020 - Resubmissions

Some or all of the information requested was not provided because we determined that the cost to do so would exceed the appropriate limit.

Case reference FOI2021/00057

Published 24 June 2021

Request

Request Received: 5 February 2021

For the August 2020 SMART Grants competition:

Please could you advise what percentage of successful applications are resubmissions?

Also what percentage of the overall applications are resubmissions?

If the information is not yet available for the August 2020 then please could you inform us of the number of successful applications that were resubmissions from an earlier competition in 2019/20?

Response

Response Sent: 22 February 2021

We estimate that the cost of determining what percentage of successful applications and overall applications to the Smart Grants August 2020 competition were resubmissions would exceed the appropriate statutory limit as specified within Section 12 of the FOIA. For UKRI the appropriate limit is £450, which represents the estimated cost of 18 hours of staff resource on locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

To explain further, in order to undertake the analysis you have requested we would be required to review each individual application to confirm the applicant's response to identify whether the application was a resubmission. Given the volume of applications, 1,919 in total, and the amount of successful applications, 74, Innovate UK has estimated the time needed to complete this task would be over 150 hours, at 5 minutes per application, to extract the relevant data. Consequently, UKRI is not obliged under Section 12 of the FOIA to process this section of your request further.

It is important to note that there were two Smart Grant competitions in 2019/20; October 2019 and January 2020. Due to the significant increase in applications between these two competitions, which has continued into the August 2020 competition, information in relation to resubmissions is not easily accessible. An analysis of resubmissions is not used as part of any routine analysis by Innovate UK and as explained above this data can no longer be automatically extracted. Therefore, while a similar analysis has been undertaken in the past the data you have requested on resubmissions is no longer readily available from the January 2020 competition to date.

We are able to confirm, however, that this information was previously determined and made available for the October 2019 Smart Grants competition, in which 17.2% of successful applications and 18.5% of overall applications were resubmissions.

Documents

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