Percentage of complaints upheld, filed and denied by DSA over the past years
Published 19 August 2013
Applies to England, Scotland and Wales
© Crown copyright 2013
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This is Freedom of Information request IA/0006713.
1. Request
I request the statistics on the percentage of complaints upheld by the DSA over the past 3 years. I am making this request under the Freedom of Information Act (Section 1). I would also like the percentage of complaints filed and denied at all 3 stages by your organisation also over the past 3 years.
2. Response
The table below shows the number of complaints received, denied and upheld by complaint stage, between 1 April 2011 and 6 February 2013.
| Complaint stage | Received | No outcome recorded | Complaint upheld | % Upheld | % Not upheld |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st stage | 10524 | 2107 | 633 | 8% | 92% |
| 2nd stage | 1793 | 1050 | 89 | 12% | 88% |
| 3rd stage | 404 | 220 | 5 | 3% | 97% |
| Other correspondence | 534 | 338 | 8 | 4% | 96% |
Please note that we retain correspondence for a period of 2 years, we therefore no longer hold information before 6 February 2011.
Before 1 April 2011, we did not have the functionality to record the outcome of complaints centrally. Between 6 February 2011 and 31 March 2011, we received 95 complaints. To find out the outcome of these complaints would involve manually checking the case file of each compliant. It is estimated that it would take ten minutes to check each complaint and would take approximately 16 hours to complete and when combined with the time it would take to answer the remainder of your request, would exceed the 24 hour working limit. This is explained below.
Between 1 April 2011 and 6 February 2013, we received 13255 complaints. Of these, there has been no outcome recorded for 3715 complaints. Some of these complaints have no outcome recorded because the complaint has not been answered yet, but the majority of these complaints have had no outcome recorded through user error. To find out the outcome of these complaints would involve manually checking 3715 case files. It is estimated that it would take ten minutes to check each complaint and would take approximately 619 hours to complete.This information is exempt from release under section 12 (1) (cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit) of the FoIA. A full breakdown of this exemption can be found at Annex A.
The appropriate limit, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, is £600 for Central Government and £450 for other public authorities, with staff costs calculated at a rate of £25 per hour. When calculating whether the appropriate limit is exceeded, authorities can take account of the costs of determining whether the information is held, locating and retrieving the information, and extracting the information from other documents. They cannot take account of the costs involved with considering whether information is exempt under the Act.