Please provide the specification for the cladding which has been used on Devon Schools in the last 10 years
Devon County Council (DCC) believes this request is manifestly unreasonable under Regulation 12 (4) of the Environmental Information Regulations.
Reason – The information requested is held by a property consultation company, who undertake approximately 20 projects for DCC per year. Some of these projects involve cladding, others not. Over a 10 year period there will have been approximately 200 projects. As there is no central record of the information, a manual check of each project would be required to ascertain if the project involved cladding, and if so, to gather the different cladding specifications from each project. We estimate that each manual check would take between 1 -2 hours. Using the rate of pay of £25* per hour, this would mean the cost of collating this information ranges from £5,000 – £10,000 depending on the amount of time each file would take.
*We have used the rate of £25 per hour, as this is the staff rate per hour indicated in the Freedom of Information Act, as such this is a reasonable reference point to calculate cost of compliance
Public interest test – Whilst DCC believe in the value of openness and transparency, we do not believe it is in the publics best interests to divert this amount of public funds to answer this request. Especially given that DCC have no concerns over the cladding currently being used on our Devon maintained schools.
By way of advice and assistance, we can advise you that all of the cladding on our schools were built to building regulation specifications that were in force at the time of build.
We can also advise that there are a number of academy schools in Devon, who are responsible for themselves. You may be able to contact each one individually in order to gather this information from them.