Please provide all information for the financial year 2021-2022, and from the start of financial year 2022 and 31 December 2022, for the following:
1. The total amount of money paid by the council to individual trade unions for whatever reason.
2. The name(s) of the trade union(s) to which council money was paid.
In response to Q1 and Q2, the 2021/22 (April 2021 – March 2022) figures are shown on this Trade union paid facility time 2021/22 – Facts and Figures (devon.gov.uk) web page on our website.
Devon County Council can confirm that we hold the information requested for the period April 2022 – December 2022. This information is intended for future publication on our website in June 2023. As we are required to publish this data in June, we believe it is reasonable to exempt it from disclosure at this time under Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act (information held with a view to its future publication).
We acknowledge that there is a general public interest in openness and transparency. However, there is a strong public interest in ensuring that we do not divert our employees away from their duties, creating additional work for them by asking them to collate, soon to be duplicated, information. Therefore, for this reason we believe that the balance of public interest currently lies in withholding this information.