FOI release

FOI2021/00360: ODA correspondence and communications

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 FOI2021/00360

Published 3 September 2021

Request

Request Received: 05 August 2021

All correspondence and communications between UKRI Central Function and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office that mentions the phrase "ODA" or "Official Development Assistance" between March 4 2021 and March 18 2021.

Response

Response Sent: 03 September 2021

I can confirm UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) hold the information relevant to your request.

We estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate statutory limit as specified within Section 12 of the FOIA which for UKRI is set at £450. This represents the estimated cost of 18 hours of staff resource on locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

Searches of the UKRI Central Function exchange, following the revised parameters outlined in your request, resulted in 589 emails for consideration and took 30 minutes to complete.

As you may be aware, we previously tested 10 emails to ensure we were able to provide reasonable timings for the estimate. The test concluded that a minimum of 2 minutes per email would be needed to determine whether the email falls within the scope of your request. Therefore, in addition to the 30 minutes it took to conduct the search this brings your request over the appropriate statutory limit.

Although your request has been refused under Section 12, under our section 16 duty to advise and assist, we would like to suggest you may wish to narrow the time frame further in order to bring your request under the cost threshold. We appreciate you have already narrowed the time frame from the original request; however, this did result in fewer search results. Therefore, we believe reducing the time frame further and perhaps focusing on an individual week would bring the search results within the appropriate limit.

Documents

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