Product and purchase data - Freedom of information requests

Title or Description: Product and purchase data
FOI Number: 202452
Date Received: 11/01/2024
Type of Request: FOI
Request or Question: 1. Calendar year 2022 (January – December)a. Item data by product, product volume, product price and supplier name for Workwear, PPE, Safety Clothing and Safety Equipment (e.g. Hi Vis jackets, gloves, safety footwear, poloshirts etc)
b. Item data by product, product volume, product price and supplier name for Janitorial and Hygiene Supplies (e.g. Paper towels, paper rolls, mops cleaning chemicals etc)
c. Item data by product, product volume, product price and supplier name for Grounds Maintenance Tools (e.g. litter pickers, brooms/brushes, blacks refuse sacks etc)

2. Calendar year 2023 (January – December)
d. Item data by product, product volume, product price and supplier name for Workwear, PPE, Safety Clothing and Safety Equipment (e.g. Hi Vis jackets, gloves, safety footwear, poloshirts etc)
e. Item data by product, product volume, product price and supplier name for Janitorial and Hygiene Supplies (e.g. Paper towels, paper rolls, mops cleaning chemicals etc)
f. Item data by product, product volume, product price and supplier name for Grounds Maintenance Tools (e.g. litter pickers, brooms/brushes, blacks refuse sacks etc)
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.

It is difficult to do this due to the way our system is set up. General Products – these are set up against generic codes (Equipment, Materials etc.) and don’t allow for the data to be shown in the same manner as catalogued items unless manually extracted line by line of which time wise this won’t be feasible due to the number of lines processed this way. In terms of the “general” items this would exceed the 40 hours of work to gain this level of detail

Therefore, we are refusing your request.

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.