Spend on meeting rooms, media, advertising, PR, consultants

These all pertain to 2008 – 9 years ago – for the entire year

1)The total amount of money spent by the authority on renting meeting rooms for any purpose

Having considered your request Devon County Council is unable to provide you with the information you have requested. The reason for this is that in 2008 the Council did not have a single item code within its finance system allocated for ‘meeting room hire’, as ‘room hire’ formed part of another code. Because of this, Devon County Council would be required to cross examine budget information and payment invoices (many of which will no longer be held) to derive the information you have requested.

Given the time period covered by your request the Council considers that to extract and retrieve the information you have requested on ‘meeting room hire’ alone from our systems would take greater than the 18 hours we are obliged to spend answering a Freedom of Information request. For this reason we feel that Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act (cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limits) applies to this information at this time.

2)The total on media, advertising, and PR

Having considered your request Devon County Council is unable to provide you the information you have requested. The reason for this is that in 2008 the Council did not have a single item code within its finance system allocated for ‘media, advertising and PR’, as this formed part of another code. Because of this, Devon County Council would be required to cross examine budget information and payment invoices to derive the information you have requested.

Given the time period covered by your request the Council considers that to extract and retrieve the information you have requested from our systems would take greater than the 18 hours we are obliged to spend answering a Freedom of Information request. For this reason we feel that Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act (cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limits) applies to this information at this time.

3)The total on external consultants

Having considered your request Devon County Council is unable to provide you the information you have requested. The reason for this is that in 2008 the Council did not have a single item code within its finance system allocated for ‘consultancy’, as some works that are commissioned involving third party contractors are attributed to specific schemes or budgeted projects. Because of this, Devon County Council would be required to cross examine budget information and invoices to derive the information you have requested.

Given the time period covered by your request the Council considers that to extract and retrieve the information you have requested from our systems would take greater than the 18 hours we are obliged to spend answering a Freedom of Information request. For this reason we feel that Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act (cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limits) applies to this information at this time.

In the interest of providing you with advice and assistance please note that if you were able to reduce the scope of your request for example by narrowing your interest to for example a single defined type of consultancy in the last financial year the Council would be happy to review your request again.