This request concerns the amount spent by your local authority on agency foster carers.
1) Please state the amount your local authority spent on agency foster carers in each of the following financial years
i) 2012/13 – £8,023.000
ii) 2013/14 – £7.047,000
iii) 2014/15 – £6,143,000
iv) 2015/16 – £7,590,000
v) 2016/17 – £8,750,000
2)
a) Please state the total number of foster placements made by your local authority.
b) Please break this number down by the number that were made with
A) Local authority foster carers
B) Agency foster carers
C) All other kinds of foster carers
Please provide information for the following financial years
i) 2012/13
ii) 2013/14
iii) 2014/15
iv) 2015/16
v) 2016/17
This information is available via already published information – please click on the link below :
3) Please state the total amount spent by your local authority on taxi transport for looked after children in the following financial years
i) 2012/13
ii) 2013/14
iii) 2014/15
iv) 2015/16
v) 2016/17
Devon County Council does hold this information but to answer the question fully we would have to download transactions on 2 finance codes – depending on who made the booking taxi transport may be coded against incidental spend (social worker booked the transport) or transport (DCCs Transport Co-ordination Service booked the transport). We would then have to analyse each transaction to determine whether they relate to transport and then identify whether this is taxi transport and then repeat this exercise for each financial year.
For 2016 – 2017 alone there are over seven thousand transactions that would require review. Those that are not easily identifiable as taxi transport will require analysis of another system to look at a specific form in each case to get this detail. The Council estimates that it would take up to two minutes to review each transaction. We therefore estimate that to extract and retrieve this information would take 233 hours.
Under the Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limits)) Regulations 2004, the Council is not obliged to spend greater than 18 hours extracting, retrieving or locating information in response to a Freedom of Information request. For this reason we consider that Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act applies (cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit).