For the years 2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17, please provide:
1. The number of staff employed by the council to have been suspended, providing the date that each was suspended
a. Please provide the reason for the suspension
b. Please provide outcome of each suspension e.g. returned to work, dismissed or resigned
The historic data for 2012-13 is not easily accessible and it is only available by looking at each individual record for the appropriate historic date. Given the large number of council employees which, in 2017, total in excess of 4,000, this would take, estimating 10 minutes per file, approximately 666 hours.
Under the Data Protection & Freedom of Information (Fees & 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).
For the years thereafter, please see the attached table below:
c. Please note whether the staff continued to receive pay and if so provide the pay bracket of their salary to the nearest £5000
Devon County Council’s Human Resources systems are not set up to enable us to easily extract this information as this type of data is not required for routine reporting purposes. Therefore to confirm or deny if this information is held and to then supply this information would require an officer to manually read through information held on an individual’s records to establish the date that they were suspended and the date that they returned to work. This exercise would involve physically locating the manual employment files which incidentally could be held in a number of locations across the Council’s operation.
We estimate that to conclude this exercise for a single member of staff is likely to take at least 60 minutes. In the time period covered by your requests there were approximately 42 staff suspended. We therefore estimate that to conclude this exercise for all staff in question would take approximately 42 hours.
Under the Data Protection & Freedom of Information (Fees & 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).