F-2011-00250 - HFEA expenditure on books
20 September 2011
Summary of request
The Authority was asked for information about the amount spent by the HFEA purchasing books in the last five years. Also, for a list of any books purchased and the cost of each.
HFEA response
The Authority estimates that the cost of complying fully with this request would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ set out in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 ('the Regulations'). This limit is £450 and for the purposes of estimating cost, staff time is calculated at a notional rate of £25 per hour. Section 12 of the FOIA allows public authorities to decline to provide information requested under the FOIA where the cost of doing so would exceed this appropriate limit.
The following advice was also given:
We are providing here the information that is most accessible and which gives you an idea of the HFEA’s book purchasing over the last five years, which is also set out below.
1. A search of our records for book purchases in the last five years would involve: identification of financial cost codes that books may have been purchased under; extraction of information about all purchases under these codes; and identification of purchases that are books. We have carried out this search for you, which took 5 hours, and identified the following information -
The table below sets out the amount identified from the search as being spent purchasing books during each of the last 5 financial years. Please note that we have included online access books and a small number of books may have been purchased using petty cash that are not included in the table.
| Year | 06/07 | 07/08 | 08/09 | 09/10 | 10/11 |
| Amount | £789.91 | £273.71 | £2,054.02 | £181.03 | £619.67 |
The search extracted some information about the books purchased. For example, we can see that the sorts of books purchased relate to IT programming, health and infertility, and legal matters. These sorts of books closely relate to our statutory and regulatory obligations. We can also see from this that the spending on books relating to legal matters appeared to be the highest.
2. To extract a list of books and the amount for each would take significantly longer. The HFEA accounts database is not designed for this purpose and would involve reading through all invoices in each year. Manual checking of invoices to extract the book titles and the cost of each would take 7 hours for each year of invoices.
Page last updated: 16 August 2012