Since April 2012, how much money has been spent in TOTAL on office printers, paper and ink and toner cartridges for each financial year including 2012-2013, 2013-2014 and 2014-2015?
Please provide a breakdown of how much has been spent on replacement ink cartridges, printer maintenance and replacement paper for each individual financial year over the same period.
Also, could you confirm that all the ink and toner cartridges purchased were original branded products (OEM)?
If it’s possible to deliver this data, then I would welcome it in whatever format or attachment deemed appropriate. Ideally though, could this be in Word or as a PDF?
However, if this request is too wide or unclear, I would be grateful if you could contact me and advise so I can amend my query. Of course, if the freedom of information request cannot be delivered due to confidentiality or excessive costs, can you assist with making a compromise which works for both of us?
Having reviewed your request we can advise that spend on printer ink is not recorded against a single expenditure code on our Finance system. Therefore to extract this expenditure would require an officer to manually review all expenditure codes against which printer ink may be recorded.
In 2014/15 there were over 42,000 transactions across expenditure codes which may have included printer ink spend. Therefore, assuming the same level of transactions for the previous two years, there could possibly be over 126,000 transactions to review.
The Council estimates that it would take 5 seconds to read the details of each transaction and to extract data which relates to printer ink. We therefore estimate that it would take approximately 175 hours extract the information you have requested from our Finance system.
Under the Act the Council is obliged to complete 18 hours work (£450 of officer time) on a Freedom of information request and therefore the Council has to advise that this request is exempt from disclosure under Section 12 of the Freedom of information Act 2000 (exceeds cost of compliance).
We are able to confirm that the Council purchases both original and compatible cartridges.