Compensation Claims Paid Out by Devon County Council

Request:

“Please could you supply me with details of all compensation claims paid out by the council between FY 2013/14 to FY 2016/17?

Please specify each individual amount, the date, what it was for (please provide a short summary of the incident/case), the location it related to ie Barnstaple and where possible who it was paid to (ie an organisation or individual).”

Response:

Please see the table provided here detailing compensation claims paid out by Devon County Council (DCC) between Financial Year 2013/14 and Financial Year 2016/17.

All claims appear to have been made by individuals as opposed to organisations.

As you will see, the table includes an overview of the type of claim made and what it relates to.  It does not, however, include exact claim details or locations as this information is not included within our payment reports.  Unfortunately, DCC is unable to supply you with this information under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act.  Under the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 public authorities are not obliged to comply with requests which exceed the cost limit of £450 (equating to 18 hours of time).

Whilst the information you have requested does sit within our electronic and paper filing systems, these systems are not set up to easily provide us with the type of information you have requested.

In order to locate, retrieve and extract claim details and locations we would need to manually extract this information from our claims system.  On the basis of 2 minutes per claim, we estimate that this would take in the region of 51 hours for the time period requested (2 x 1,547 = 51 hours).

However, if you are able to refine your request so that it may fall within the cost limit as described above, we would be happy to review your request.