Question 1) How many blue badge applications were made to your local authority in a) 2017/18, b) 2018/19, c) 2019/20 and
d) 2020/21
Question 2) How many blue badge applications were i) approved and ii) rejected in
a) 2017/18,
b) 2018/19,
c) 2019/20 and
d) 2020/21
Question 3) How many appeals were i) lodged and ii) approved where the initial blue badge application had been rejected in
a) 2017/18,
b) 2018/19,
c) 2019/20 and
d) 2020/21
Question 4) What was the average time for an applicant to receive a blue badge from submission of the original application in
a) 2017/18,
b) 2018/19,
c) 2019/20 and
d) 2020/21
Response
We have 2 resources which can give us information on Blue Badge applications-
- The Dept. for Transport's Blue Badge system, and
- Our Customer Relationship Management system (Kana)
But each of these have limitations. The Dept. for Transport system contains records of all successful awards of Blue Badges, but unsuccessful applications are not recorded on that system. Our CRM system records all customer contact regarding Blue Badges, but that includes basic requests for information, requests for a paper form, through to completed applications. Unfortunately due to the limitations of our current reporting tools, we are not able to break down these records of customer enquiries in a manner which would provide the statistic that you have requested.
To answer Questions (1), Question 2(ii), and Question 3, we would have to manually view each customer enquiry on our system. Our CRM system records show that we received the following number of Blue Badge contacts/enquiries in the years in question-
2017/18 – 3176
2018/19 - 3491
2019/20 - 3686
2020/21 - 2525
We therefore estimate that we would have to manually check 12878 enquiries, taking an average of 2 minutes each which would total 25756 minutes (429 hours- which would equate to 61 days work). The cost of investigating this would exceed the prescribed limits therefore these parts of your request are refused under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act Scotland 2002.
Question 2 (i) – number of approved Blue Badge applications.
These are the numbers of Blue Badges awarded in the Dept. for Transport system for the specified years-
Year 2017/18 2018/19 2019/20 2020/21
Badges awarded 2024 2332 2431 1707
Question 4- average time for a customer to receive a Blue Badge. This information is obtainable from the Dept. for Transport Blue Badge system, but only from an upgrade of that system in early 2019. Information for years 2017/18 and 2018/19 is therefore not held and we therefore give notice of this under section 17 (1) (b) of the Freedom of Information Act 2002.
For years 2019/20 and 2020/21, while it is possible to work out an average number of days between the start date of the application on the system and the date the Badge was requested to be printed on the system, there is no way of knowing how many further days it took for the Badge to be delivered to the customer. Also, evidence suggests that working out this using ALL records may give an inaccurate average. It appears that the dates on the system will be accurate for applications submitted online, however, when the application is submitted by other means e.g. in person, or via a paper application, the dates entered on the system may not fully reflect the time taken. For example, in cases where the application is submitted by paper form and further information is requested, the date recorded as the start of the application may be given as the date all information was gathered rather than the date the paper application was first received, thus giving an inaccurate average. Because of this, I can supply the following information for ONLINE claims made in years 2019/20 and 2020/21.
Year (Submitted by Online channel only) 2019/20 2020/21
Total days from Application submitted, to date badge printed 5091 12684
Number of badges awarded 375 908
Average days 14 14
For applications submitted by other channels, each application would require to be manually checked for accuracy, so this part of your request is refused under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act Scotland 2002. (Please see the calculation set out above).
