1. In the two most recent full financial years ( 2015-16 and 2016-17) how much money was paid in grants and funding to local businesses/start-ups, religious groups/establishments, and charities by your council? This does not include loans.
For example, payments made to support a new business that could benefit the local economy, enable a charity to carry out worthy project, money to enable a local church to offer support to homeless people, etc.
Please break down by year.
2. For the year 2016-17, please break down by the name of the charity/business, the amount of money they received, and a brief outline of the services or projects they offer/planned to offer.
In response to both questions, we can confirm the following:
We can confirm that there have been transactions to over 11,000 local businesses/start ups, etc. as listed in the request. To review our accounts and extract the information, allowing, say, 5 minutes per transaction, would take in excess of 900 hours. This exceeds the appropriate limit of 18 hours which is set for the purposes of section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and we are therefore not obliged to provide you with this information.
However, by way of advice and assistance, we can confirm that information specifically relating to grants paid by calendar year rather than financial year is available online – it is updated annually in January for the preceding year. The link is here :
https://www.devon.gov.uk/factsandfigures/open-data/spending-and-finance/grants-paid/
Further, there is some information on the public website regarding contributions from locality budgets, which are under the control of the elected councillor for that area. These can be found here :
The published budget books also contain some information on grants and contributions paid. These can be found here, on the individual service pages :
https://www.devon.gov.uk/finance-and-budget/budgets/
So for example, on page 64 of the 16/7 book there are details of grants and contributions paid by the Planning, Transportation & Environment service.