Please provide:
1) The number of Hoarding licences (excluding renewals) issued by Devon County Council per year, for the last 5 years.
2) The number of Hoarding and Scaffold licences (excluding renewals and licences included in item 1 above) issued by Devon County Council per year, for the last 5 years.
3) The number of Scaffold licenses (excluding renewals and licences included in items 2 and 3 above) issued by Devon County Council per year, for the last 5 years.
In response to questions 1 – 3, Devon County Council believes compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. This is because the system we use does not allow us to filter by application type. Hoardings are usually included as part of scaffold applications. To extract the required information would mean a manual review of 8,096 applications. If each application were to be reviewed for 1 minute each to locate and extract relevant information, this would take 135 hours and therefore Section 12 is applied.
In the interests of providing advice and assistance, we are able to provide you with the following information:
The combined total of all applications types including refusals and renewals is: 8,096
From 24th November 2018- to 24th November 2019 – total number of permits = 1543
From 24th November 2019 – to 24th November 2020 – total number of permits = 1556
From 24th November 2020 – to 24th November 2021 – total number of permits = 1782
From 24th November 2021 – to 24th November 2022 – total number of permits = 1562
From 24th November 2022 – to 24th November 2023 – total number of permits = 1676