This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 relating to children’s social services referrals.
For each year of the last five years, I would like to know:
1) The number of child safeguarding referrals that were made in relation to a child under the age of 18 taking or being prescribed (or suspected of taking or being prescribed) puberty blocking medication or cross-sex hormones.
2) The number of multi-agency assessments under Section 17 Children Act 1989 that were carried out in relation to a child under the age of 18 taking or being prescribed (or suspected of taking or being prescribed) puberty blocking medication or cross-sex hormones.
3) The number of assessments in (2) that ended in a) no further action b) a ‘Child in Need’ plan being drawn up c) a section 47 investigation being initiated.
4) The number of section 47 investigations in 3)(c) that ended with a ‘child protection plan’ being drawn up.
Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit, which for local government is set at £450 or 18 hours of officer time.
Devon County Council does not hold the requested information in a readily available format.
For us to locate and retrieve the information from our systems would require the manual review of 30,030 referral records with an estimated review time of 10 minutes per record.
Therefore, this work would take over 5,000 hours which is in excess of the appropriate cost limit.
As a result, this response acts as a Refusal Notice for the whole of your request.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance about how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held, this is not possible for this request.