Please can I have the total number of recorded food bank referrals made by all council staff for every year from 2007-2017?
Devon County Council can confirm that we hold the information you have requested. However the Council is not required to report on this information and therefore our systems are not designed to enable the easy extraction of this data. To extract and retrieve this information, the Council would be required to read through the records of 13845 individuals who the Council has provided support to in 2015/16 alone. We would then need to record each instance that a person has been referred to a food bank.
We estimate that to conduct this exercise would take approximately 10 minutes for a single record. We therefore estimate that compliance with your request would take 2307.5 hours for just one year. Under the Data Protection & Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limits) Regulations 2004 the Council is not obliged to spend greater than 18 hours locating, extracting or retrieving information in response to a Freedom of Information request. For this reason we feel that Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act applies (cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit).