I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information in relation to Looked After Children:
* The total number of Looked After Children under your local authority care, where family members outside the United Kingdom were explored between January 2015 and December 2017 inclusive.
Devon County Council do not hold a central record of this information and therefore to obtain this information would require a manual review of all case files concerning looked after children during this time period. We can confirm that, during this time period, the total number of children looked after between 1 Jan 2017 and 31 December 2017 was 1,374 individual children. Based an approximately 20 minutes per file, this would take 458 hours .
This is in excess of the appropriate time limit of 18 hours and this information is therefore exempt from disclosure pursuant to s.12 of Freedom of Information Act 2000.
* The number of Looked After Children under your local authority care that were subsequently placed outside the United Kingdom between January 2015 and December 2017 inclusive.
* The number and type of placement orders used for placing Looked After Children from your local authority care with family members abroad between January 2015 and December 2017 inclusive.
Disclosure of the information in response to both of these questions would potentially identify the individuals concerned and would therefore be a breach of their personal data and the first data protection principle pursuant to the General Data Protection Regulation. This information is therefore exempt from disclosure pursuant to s.40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.