FOI release

SIA decision timescales for 'consider additional factors' refusals

Published 15 April 2024

Request

Please provide information for the past 2 years:

1. How many applicants have not been given a decision either way 8 months after submitting an application?
2. How many of these were sent a ‘consider additional factors’ response?
3. How many applicants have not been given a decision 3 months after a complete response to a ‘consider additional factors’ request?
4. How many applicants have waited over 12 months for a decision on their application from the date of making an application?
5. For each of the above questions, how many have a criminal record?

Response

I can confirm that the SIA does hold some of this information. A response to each question has been provided below in turn.

Question 1

We have not provided figures from the ‘submission date’. This is because when an application is submitted, there are often still tasks the applicant must complete before the application effectively reaches the SIA for further checks and a decision. Counting from the ‘submission date’ data would therefore not provide an accurate picture. We have instead provided you with information from the time an application goes into ‘Checks in Progress’.

While we have included the proportion of aged cases involving criminality, this is a minimum figure. The reason for many applications taking longer to process is the requirement for overseas criminal record checks, and once received these may potentially include criminality.

From the checks in progress stage to first decision date, a total of 1,139 waited over 8 months for a decision. Out of these a total of 127 had some sort of criminal record.

Questions 2 and 3

I can confirm that this part of the email will constitute 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 database where information on ‘consider additional factors’ applicants is held is multifaced which means information cannot be instantly isolated and retrieved for the purposes of providing readily available figures. Alongside the database, the SIA also uses software such as Microsoft Outlook to assist in ensuring consider additional factors refusal letters and additional connected responses are sent to licence applicants in time. This means that information for this part of the request requires additional checks to assure the data we provide is accurate and reliable. The need to interrogate two systems manually over the time period you have requested, would significantly exceed cost and time limitations.

Next steps

In order to better facilitate your request, I suggest that you limit the scope of your request, so that we can manually search our systems until the appropriate cost limit is reached. Given that this will be a very time intensive exercise to manually look through our systems and filter out consider additional factor responses, I would ask that you limit your search to a particular month within the period that you are interested in.

The SIA will search as many cases 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 part of your FOIA request and whether you would like assistance in trying to refine the scope of your request.

Question 4

From the checks in progress stage to the first decision date, a total of 259 applicants waited over 12 months for a decision. Out of these, 34 had some sort of criminal record.

Question 5

This answer to this question has been provided in questions we are able to provide data for, above.

[Reference: FOI 0496]