Casework by councillors enquiry
Case reference FOI2026/00514
Received 6 March 2026
Published 7 April 2026
Request
Please advise the number of pieces of "casework" raised by each councillor with your local authority from 01/03/2025 to 01/03/2026 - as a list with the number of queries each councillor has logged.
Please include all queries officially logged by each named councillor - whether on behalf of a resident they represent or where the councillor has raised the query on his own account. (Often these are known as "member enquiries").
Response
I am writing to confirm that the cost of compliance with your request exceeds the "appropriate limit" referred to in Section 12 (1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, so your request is deemed to be exempt. The appropriate limit for public bodies, other than central government, legislative bodies, and the armed forces, is £450. Based on a flat rate of £25 per person, per hour, the exemption is triggered if the cost of compliance is in excess of 18 hours.
The rationale for this is as follows:
I suspect that Council officers have received a considerable number of written communications to each of the 48 councillors on Guildford Borough Council in the 12 months 01/03/2025 to 01/03/2026. We would have to ask every member of staff to go through all their correspondence from every councillor to see if they were raising queries. On the assumption that each of our 48 councillors had communicated in writing to officers on an average of 18 occasions in that twelve month period, that would be 864 communications in total. If each communication took an average of two minutes to download and review to establish whether the communication was a query, that would take a combined total of 1,728 minutes to verify – or 28.8 hours, which well exceeds the 18 hour exemption threshold.
However you may wish to narrow your request down to a shorter time period, or restrict it to correspondence to or from particular officers. Please advise us of your wishes in this regard and we will review the situation.
Yours sincerely,
FOI Team
Guildford Borough Council
Documents
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