Staff Benefits Portal (3709/20)
Request
1) HR Manager/Reward and Benefits Manager’s name and email address?
2) No of permanent staff employed by the Constabulary?
3) What staff benefits portal do you currently offer employees/when does the contract expire?
4) What salary sacrifice schemes do staff have access to?
5) Do you offer staff access to a telephone/face to face employee assistance programme?
6) If face to face counselling is available what is the current spend on this?
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested for question 6) is not available in a readily retrievable format. Our Occupational Health department has an overall budget for all ‘Employee Medical and Wellbeing’ costs, however, this budget is not broken down to a level of detail that would enable us to identify the current spend on face to face counselling. In order to ascertain an approximate spend for this service, we would need to locate and retrieve copies of all invoices from Care First and manually review each one to identify whether they relate to face to face counselling or an alternative service.
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide information for questions 2 – 5 as this was retrieved during our initial research. 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.
Please be advised that the requested information for question 1 is exempt by virtue of Section 40(2) – Personal information.
Section 40(2) is an absolute and class based exemption if to release the information exists would breach the third party’s data protection rights. In this case to release this personal information would not constitute fair processing of the data. As this exemption is class based I am not required to identify the harm in disclosure and in this instance I believe that the right to privacy outweighs any public interest in release.