Gas and Electricity Usage (228A/22)
Request
I would like to know how much has the organisation paid for gas and electricity in the past two financial years. I would like it to be broken down as follows:
- The total amount of electricity used at your Police Force, measured in kWh.
- The total amount of gas used at your Police Force, measured in cubic metres.
- The total billed amount for electricity usage at your Police Force.
- The total billed amount for gas usage at your Police Force.
If you need to break this down by each station in your area then please do not hesitate to do so.
I would like this data to be presented in an Excel or PDF spreadsheet with a new sheet for each year and a section on each point of information. I would like the data to be broken down by month to this month’s latest.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because the information requested for questions 1 and 2 is not held in a centrally collated format. This means we would need to locate and retrieve every bill for each individual building/station across a 24 month time period. Once received we would have to manually collate this information into the format requested. To conduct this search, however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide relevant information for questions 3 & 4 as this was retrieved during our initial research. However, it is important to note that the month in which an invoice is paid is not the month that the utility usage relates to because invoicing is always at least one month in arrears. Please see attached document.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: