Request for material relating to SIA guidance production
Published 30 March 2026
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Request
Can you please supply all materials that you hold (including details of meetings, meeting notes, telephone calls and telephone transcripts) that relate to the production of your guidance documents: both internal information and information that involves Ofqual, Ofqual Awarding Organisations, and the Health & Safety Executive that includes or involves [NAME REDACTED] (from when First Aid was introduced into security training).
Response
I note from our FOI records that you previously submitted an FOI request on 5 August 2024 which is almost identical to this request. You were sent a refusal notice on the basis that it would exceed the appropriate limit to comply with the request in its entirety. It was suggested that you refine the request so that information may be provided within the appropriate cost limit. A refined request was not received.
I confirm that the SIA holds the information that you have requested, and this email constitutes a refusal to deal with your request for the reasons I will set out below.
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.
The SIA began gathering material on this matter from the beginning of 2016 to date. Since that time, certain employees have left the organisation. This means in order to obtain some of the information you have requested the SIA would need to retrieve archived files. We would then need to filter through the materials and determine what pertains to this request. This task increases the time and costs it would take to respond to your request.
Furthermore, the information you have requested cannot be instantly isolated and retrieved. The SIA would be required to search through various databases in order to locate the information requested.
The SIA has a total of 4 databases and approximately over 60 files where this data is kept. We have calculated it to take about 25 minutes per file to search. This means that it would take about 1,500 minutes which works out to be over the 18-hour time limit. It would in fact would take over 25 hours. At over 25 hours, at a rate of £25 per person it would equal £625 to undertake this task. This exceeds the cost limitation of £450.
What information can we provide?
In March 2023, we responded to an FOI request which relates to this one.
A copy of this response can be found on our webpage here: Correspondence about the first aid courses accepted by the SIA - GOV.UK.
Next steps
In order to facilitate a response to your request, I suggest that you limit the scope of your request so that we can manually search for the information requested until the appropriate cost and time limit is reached. Given that this will be a very time intensive exercise to manually look at each file and filter out the information that is pertinent to your request, I would ask that you limit your search to a particular 3- to 6-month period within a year that you are interested in.
The SIA will search as many files as possible up to the appropriate cost limit within this reduced timeframe. If we are able to search the case well within the appropriate cost limit, we will get in touch and request that you provide us with details of a further month that you would like to be searched.
I would be grateful if you could confirm your position in respect of this FOI request and whether you would like assistance in trying to refine the scope of your request.
[Ref: FOI 0579]