Information

Request

Further to your email dated 28^th March 2026 in which you requested the following information:

“Please provide the following recorded information for the period from 1 January 2023 to the date of your searches, unless a different date range is expressly stated. I ask that searches be conducted across all relevant teams, including but not limited to the Commissioner’s office, chief executive or monitoring function, finance, commissioning, procurement, estates, legal services, fire governance staff, audit liaison, communications, and any programme or project teams dealing with collaboration, transformation, co location, property, fleet, control room, shared services, or contractor management.

1. Internal reports and briefing papers
Please disclose all internal reports, option appraisals, business cases, briefing notes, slide decks, submissions, recommendations, decision papers and draft papers prepared for or considered by the Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner if applicable, Chief Executive, Chief Finance Officer, Monitoring Officer, Chief Fire Officer, or senior governance boards concerning:

a. collaboration or shared service arrangements between police and fire
b. estate rationalisation, disposal, acquisition, redevelopment, refurbishment or co location of fire or shared sites
c. budget savings, financial recovery measures, efficiency targets, or affordability pressures affecting fire governance or related projects
d. contractor performance, value for money concerns, procurement strategy, or contract variation
e. risks to service delivery, response capability, resilience, staffing, or public safety arising from the above

2. Contracts and procurement documents
Please disclose copies of contracts, contract schedules, specifications, invitations to tender, requests for quotation, tender evaluation documents, award reports, waiver forms, exemption forms, extension papers, variation orders and procurement approval records relating to any relevant contractor, consultant, project manager, estates adviser, legal adviser, surveyor, facilities provider, technology provider or collaboration partner connected with the issue described above.

Where full contracts are withheld in part, please still provide redacted copies and a schedule identifying each contract, supplier name, contract value, start date, end date, extension options, and the legal basis for any redactions.

3. Meeting minutes and governance records
Please disclose minutes, agendas, action logs, decision notices and attendance records for all meetings at which the above issue was discussed, including:

a. Commissioner decision meetings
b. fire governance boards
c. audit, risk or assurance meetings
d. senior leadership meetings where papers were considered
e. programme boards or project boards
f. meetings with Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service leadership
g. meetings with external advisers, contractors or partner bodies where substantive decisions or recommendations were recorded

4. Internal correspondence
Please disclose internal correspondence, including emails, Teams messages if retained, memoranda, and formal notes of telephone calls, between senior officers and relevant staff discussing:

a. the rationale for any project, spending proposal, savings proposal, site decision, collaboration arrangement or procurement route
b. concerns, objections, risks, escalations, legal issues, audit issues or dissenting views
c. affordability, overspend, delays, contractor performance, deliverability or reputational implications
d. the drafting, amendment or clearance of public statements, decision notices or responses to scrutiny

To keep this manageable, for correspondence I am content for searches to focus on named senior roles rather than every employee, namely the Commissioner, Chief Executive, Chief Finance Officer, Monitoring Officer, Chief Fire Officer, Head of Estates if held, Head of Procurement if held, and any programme lead for the relevant project or collaboration work.

5. Communications with contractors and partner organisations
Please disclose correspondence, meeting notes, letters and briefing exchanges with contractors, consultants, local authorities, government departments, blue light partners, or other public bodies concerning:

a. project scope, contract performance, milestones, delays, defects, payment, extension requests, renegotiation or disputes
b. collaboration models, estate use, site sharing, governance structures or funding assumptions
c. any concern over compliance with procurement rules, subsidy control, conflicts of interest, or approval thresholds

6. Policy reviews, legal and assurance material
Please disclose policy reviews, internal audits, external audit reports, assurance reviews, gateway reviews, legal advice summaries, equality impact assessments, strategic risk assessments, data protection impact assessments if relevant, and post implementation reviews connected to the issue.”

Response

Having reviewed your request, I feel is too broad to conduct a proper and comprehensive search within the appropriate limit, as set out in Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

Section 12 of the FOIA allows a public authority to refuse a request if the cost of providing the information to the applicant would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004: The Regulations provide that the appropriate limit to be applied to requests received by public authorities is £450. For the purposes of the estimate the costs of performing these activities should be estimated at a rate of £25 per hour.

This is therefore equivalent to 18 hours work. In estimating the cost of complying with a request for information, a public body can only take into account any reasonable costs incurred in: (a) determining whether it holds the information, (b) locating the information, or a document which may contain the information, (c) retrieving the information, or a document which may contain the information, and (d) extracting the information from a document containing it.

To fulfil this request, it would require OPFCC staff to collate, review and redact a large amount of information, data and documents over a three-year period which would include commercially sensitive, operational and third-party information.

The collation of information is further complicated by the fact that several senior leadership roles have changed since 2023 which would require obtaining access to dormant email accounts and related individual network folders on the shared IT network. For example, the OPFCC appointed a new Chief Executive in December 2023, a new PFCC was elected in May 2024, a new Chief Constable was appointed in October 2023 and a new Chief Fire Officer was appointed in February 2024.

We estimate that locating, retrieving and extracting the information would exceed the statutory cost limit of £450 (18 hours of staff time) given the size and complexity of the request. For example, accessing dormant email accounts entails a process in which a request is made to the IT department who then allocate it to a member of staff to review and assess.

Whilst the OPFCC cannot access the files or emails of the Chief Constable or the Chief Fire Officer, the request will require seeking access to a number of dormant accounts and then reviewing and redacting a large number of files, emails and documents. It is also important to understand that the OPFCC uses Northamptonshire Police’s IT systems, therefore accessing individual accounts is not something the OPFCC can do centrally on a day-to-day basis. Accessing dormant email accounts entails a process in which a request is made to the IT department who then allocate it to a member of staff to review and assess. This request then has to be signed off by a senior manager. In all it is my estimation that this process would take six hours of staff time.

In terms of the OPFCC, your request will require locating and reviewing information from at least ten separate email accounts and computer drives. To give you some indication of the potential amount of information that falls within the scope of your request, a previous FOI request established that the average number of emails held within 50 OPFCC accounts was over 34,000. It is our assessment that reviewing and extracting the Information which would entail manually reviewing records to extract the information requested and checking content for accuracy and completeness. It is our estimated that this process will require at least two hours per account which would take 10 hours of staff time.

Finally, given the scope and sensitivity of the information requested, the preparation for disclosure needs to be thorough, accurate and in line with our responsibilities under the Data Protection Act 2018. It is our estimation that collating information into a response format and conducting necessary redactions of personal or exempt information will take a further 16 hours of staff time.

 

Total Estimated Time

• Total staff time: 32 hours
• Statutory rate: £25 per hour
• Total estimated cost: £800

As set out above, the appropriate limit under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for this authority is £450 (18 hours). As the estimated cost exceeds this limit, the request is refused under section 12(1) of the Act.

The OPFCC is committed to being open and transparent, however I am concerned that your request is unfocussed, would impose a burden by obliging the OPFCC to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details; encompass information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request and would create a burden by requiring the OPFCC to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.

Under Section 16 of the FOIA we are required to consider what advice and assistance we can provide to help you submit a request we may be able to respond to. We would suggest you are more specific about what you require in terms of the information sought and level of details you are requesting from the OPFCC.

For example, you may wish to:

• Narrow the timeframe covered by your request;
• Limit the request to a specific department or type of record;
• Specify particular documents or subjects of interest.

Please contact us if you would like help in reformulating your request.