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Freedom of Information: Right to know request
Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act), for the following information:
“I would like to narrow down the focus of the request for complaints with a time frame of August 2008 to date which covers the period when the element of Financial Hardship was clearly made within the FSA Waiver on Bank Charges”.
The Act requires us to comply with a request, unless it would be too expensive to do so, as estimated in accordance with the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 made by the Department of Constitutional Affairs (now Ministry of Justice). The regulations provide that, for the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the cost limit is £450 i.e. 18 hours at the rate of £25 per person per hour. The regulations allow us to take into account when estimating the cost of complying with a request, time spent determining whether we hold the information requested; locating and retrieving it and extracting the information from the relevant document(s).
In this case we are not able to provide you with the information you have requested, within the cost limit as described above. To expand on our previous response to your request number FOI1245, we receive information from consumers in various ways, not always in the form of an official ‘complaint’. This information could therefore be recorded in a number of different ways, depending on the subject matter. This information may then need to be reviewed by one of the supervisory teams responsible for the 28 firms who adopted the waiver, or the FSA’s bank charges project team, to determine the action to be taken as a result of the information received. The information we hold is held individually, either by one of the 28 firm supervisory teams or the bank charges project team, and is therefore not recorded centrally. This means that in order to meet your request, we would need to conduct a search of all the relevant files in each of those areas, to collate the information and provide it to you.
As the information you have requested is spread across these files, in order to answer your request, we would need to review and assess all of these files. On that basis, we estimate that the cost of retrieving the information you have requested, and editing it to take out irrelevant information would exceed the £450 limit. As our policy is not to divert our resources from our regulatory functions in order to meet requests under the Act in excess of the cost limit, we will not carry out an exercise to identify the information you have requested.
Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act), for the following information:
“I would like to narrow down the focus of the request for complaints with a time frame of August 2008 to date which covers the period when the element of Financial Hardship was clearly made within the FSA Waiver on Bank Charges”.
The Act requires us to comply with a request, unless it would be too expensive to do so, as estimated in accordance with the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 made by the Department of Constitutional Affairs (now Ministry of Justice). The regulations provide that, for the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the cost limit is £450 i.e. 18 hours at the rate of £25 per person per hour. The regulations allow us to take into account when estimating the cost of complying with a request, time spent determining whether we hold the information requested; locating and retrieving it and extracting the information from the relevant document(s).
In this case we are not able to provide you with the information you have requested, within the cost limit as described above. To expand on our previous response to your request number FOI1245, we receive information from consumers in various ways, not always in the form of an official ‘complaint’. This information could therefore be recorded in a number of different ways, depending on the subject matter. This information may then need to be reviewed by one of the supervisory teams responsible for the 28 firms who adopted the waiver, or the FSA’s bank charges project team, to determine the action to be taken as a result of the information received. The information we hold is held individually, either by one of the 28 firm supervisory teams or the bank charges project team, and is therefore not recorded centrally. This means that in order to meet your request, we would need to conduct a search of all the relevant files in each of those areas, to collate the information and provide it to you.
As the information you have requested is spread across these files, in order to answer your request, we would need to review and assess all of these files. On that basis, we estimate that the cost of retrieving the information you have requested, and editing it to take out irrelevant information would exceed the £450 limit. As our policy is not to divert our resources from our regulatory functions in order to meet requests under the Act in excess of the cost limit, we will not carry out an exercise to identify the information you have requested.
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