Working From Home Related Expenses - Freedom of information requests

Title or Description: Working From Home Related Expenses
FOI Number: 181
Date Received: 13/02/2022
Type of Request: FOI
Request or Question: Please can you provide the following details of working from home related expenditure since February 2020 for employees who started working from home either full time or part time who were previously office based.1. Total cost of all working from home related expenses claims and payments to staff.2.Number of staff who are still working from home who were previously office based.3. Total cost of WFH related expenditure by category, e.g. IT equipment, furniture, utility bill reimbursement.
Response: 1. Home Working Allowance paid from Feb 2020 to date = £278.56

2. The information requested is not held centrally on a register or in a system. This would mean all departments, services and teams would be required to carry out relevant searches for recorded information held by them. It is estimated that by requesting individual officers to respond to this question and the time taken to compile a response it would exceed the £600 cost limit, and therefore, section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 is applied.
If there is a specific service of Scottish Borders Council that you are interested in, we would be happy to consider a narrowed new request for information.
For information, some staff has been asked to fill in a formal application which is captured on a O365 Form. This has been made for blended working requests but this does not cover everyone.

3. Equipment Purchase scheme paid (reduced by the amount where employee had to make a repayment) = £73,468.68