Foodbank Referrals - Freedom of information requests

Title or Description: Foodbank Referrals
FOI Number: 236
Date Received: 01/03/2022
Type of Request: FOI
Request or Question: Please find below the following request for information to be considered under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002: How many people over the age of 50 were referred by your local authority to a food bank in the calendar years of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021?If possible, could the answer be broken down into the following age ranges:* 50-59
* 60-69
* 70-79
* 80 and over
If these age ranges are not available, information regarding all adults over 50 would still be very helpful.
Response: Scottish Borders Council has considered your request and concluded that the cost of complying with it would be more than £600. Under S12 (1) of FOISA 2002 Scottish Borders Council is not obliged to comply with a request that is estimated to exceed this cost. Our Performance Team can run a report to determine the number of records on the system for people who are over the age of 50 and currently there are 20,044 records during the periods requested. We have estimated that an average of 10 minutes would be spent interrogating one record. As there is no way to identify the case note type that would include the Food Bank Referrals, they would have to be looked individually at and this could vary from 1 case note to 100+ over a 5 year period.
The current figure will include some anomalies but this should give a rough idea of the number of cases that need to be looked at.
20,044 (files) x 10 minutes (per file) = 3340 hours Even if we were only charging £1 per hour, it would still take us beyond the £600 max.
A new workflow has been implemented in Mosaic in February 2022 and from that point, information about Food Banks can be reported on. However, prior to this, the information was recorded in a text field within a case note and we are not able to get the required information.