Homelessness Reports - Freedom of information requests

Title or Description: Homelessness Reports
FOI Number: 15690
Date Received: 11/10/2021
Type of Request: FOI
Request or Question: I would like to request the following information under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA):* The number of reports to housing officers the council has received from either internal or external agencies of a person or family who is at risk of homelessness in the last 12 months.
Response: I can confirm that Scottish Borders Council does hold this information however, we are unable to identify any cases by means of reporting as details of referral reports from agencies are held in individual case files and cannot be collated without manually viewing information and documentation held for each and every customer record. We estimate that we would have to manually check approximately 1100 cases from 2 case management databases and cross check every case between the 2 databases at an average of 15 minutes each which would total 16500 minutes (275 hours which would equate to 39 days work). The cost of investigating this would exceed the prescribed limits therefore this part of your request is refused under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act Scotland 2002.
We appreciate that this will be disappointing to you. We would be pleased to discuss whether your request could be changed, to bring down the cost of providing the information and allow us to respond.

Please contact the Information Management Team to discuss options.