FOI release

FOI2022/00047: Funding Innovate UK provide to each Agri-Epi Centre

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 FOI2022/00047

Published 5 February 2024

Request

Request Received: 11 February 2022

Please could I politely request details of the amount of funding Innovate UK provide to each Agri-Epi Centre and the conditions of the funding that must be met by the receiving centre.

Response

Response sent: 11 April 2022

I can confirm UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) hold the information relevant to your request. Please see a spreadsheet containing the funding details for the Agri-Epi Centre attached at FOI2022 00047 Agri Epi Centre. Please note that several projects have yet to be added to the Innovate UK transparency page[1] however these are expected to be added by the end of this month.

With regards to the funding conditions, however, we estimate that the cost of complying with this part of 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.

To gather this information, we have determined that it would take over 18 hours locate, retrieve, and extract the information. This is due to the fact the terms and conditions of these grants are bespoke and can have up to 7 variations each. Therefore, the terms and variations for the 33 funded projects need be extracted from several sources and the latest agreed amendment identified. We extracted a random sample of 4 grants which took a minimum of 35 minutes each to locate retrieve and extract. This has led to our estimate of 19.5 hours as a minimum to comply with this section of the request.

Consequently, UKRI is not obliged under Section 12 of the FOIA to process this section of your request.

Under our section 16 duty to advise and assist, you may wish to choose individual projects that you wish to request the conditions for. However, we must also advise we had considered the application of section 43, commercially sensitive, prior to evidencing that the cost limit would be breached.

[1] https://www.ukri.org/publications/innovate-uk-funded-projects-since-2004/

Documents

• FOI2022 00047 Funding to Agri Epi Centres pdf.xlsx.pdf (150.6 KB)
• FOI_Response_Letter_FOI2022_00047_Redacted.pdf (231.6 KB)

This is UK Research and Innovation's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.

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