Number of SIA employees with criminal records
Published 14 November 2023
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1. Request
I want to know how many of the SIA employees in all departments have criminal records.
2. Response
I can confirm that the SIA does hold some of this information. This email will constitute a refusal to deal with your requests for the reasons I have set out below.
2.1 Exceeding the appropriate cost limit
Section 12(1) – (4) of the Freedom of Information Act allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to comply with the request in its entirety or to confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. In the case of a public authority such as the SIA, the appropriate cost limit is £450.
The ICO guidance The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 sets out how a public authority should estimate whether the work required to obtain information is reasonable and appropriate. In the case of requests that would require work on the part of public authority staff, this is estimated at a rate of £25 per person per hour. This means that 18 hours is considered the appropriate limit.
We do not keep readily available statistical data on employee personnel files, which means that the relevant information you have requested cannot be instantly isolated and retrieved. Each personnel file belonging to each SIA employee would need to be manually interrogated to find this requested information. We have calculated this to take about 10 minutes per file. The SIA has 350 employees and therefore with each file taking 10 minutes to interrogate, it would take us 58 hours to retrieve the information you have requested. The cost of retrieving this information would be £1,450 (this is calculated by multiplying 58 hours – the total time it would take to interrogate all SIA personnel files – by the estimated staff work rate of £25 per hour). This significantly exceeds the appropriate time limit of 18 hours and the appropriate cost limit of £450.
2.2 What information can we provide?
To assist you with retrieving this information, given the 10 minute time it takes to interrogate each personnel file, we can check a specific period to ensure we stay within the time and cost limitations. We suggest a time frame of the last 12 months. With this specific time period we will interrogate the personnel files of employees who joined the SIA within the last 12 months.
2.3 Next steps
In order to better facilitate your request, I suggest that you consider refining your request to a particular time frame so that we can manually search each personnel file until the appropriate cost and time limit is reached. The SIA will search as many personnel files within the appropriate cost and time limit within a particular timeframe. If we are able to search the files well within the appropriate cost and time limit we will get in touch and request that you provide us with details of a further time period that you would like us to search.
I would be grateful if you could confirm your position in respect of this FOIA request and whether you would like any further assistance in trying to refine the scope of your request.
[Reference: FOI 0458]