FOI request (FOIR-136965711)

Duty of Care - Housing

Requested Mon 12 August 2019
Responded Wed 21 August 2019

The following request relates to Housing, Duty of care applications and Re-housing (Homemove) applications/offers.

Q1. How many services offered by HBC were rejected/blocked/denied/cancelled and recorded as failure to attend (2015 -2018)?

Q2. How many of those fail to attends were from appointments organised via email or postal communication (2015 - 2018)?

Q3. How many appealed those decisions?

Q4. How many were rejected and what percentage of those parties were male vs female?

Response

'Duty of care' applications, this is not a term we use in Housing services therefore cannot provide any information relating to this.

Q1. How many services offered by HBC were rejected/blocked/denied/cancelled and recorded as failure to attend (2015 -2018)?

Housing = customers who present to the council as homeless are triaged by the Community Contact Centre via a Firmstep form. If they failed to attend it would be recorded against that case in Firmstep. We are unable to run Firmstep reports to obtain this information.

If the appointment was for temporary accommodation then the temporary accommodation team would liaise directly with the customer's housing officer. The housing officer would then contact the customer directly to find out if they still need our assistance. Information would be recorded against the case.

NOTICE OF REFUSAL

The information requested would require us to manually search 3000 customer records and this would far exceed the time limit set out by the Information Commissioner therefore under S12 of the Freedom of information Act 2000 provides an exemption from the obligation to comply with a request for information if the estimated costs of complying with that request would exceed the prescribed appropriate limit.

We estimate that the costs of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit by a significant amount.

For this reason we feel unable to comply with this request.

Homemove = The council does not record this information against the Homemove case. This is done by the relevant Registered Provider (housing association) who would have arranged and carried out the viewing of the property directly with the customer.

NOTICE OF REFUSAL

The information requested to find these cases would mean checking each shortlist, then check each person nominated on that shortlist to find those who were rejected and then check the journal on each of those rejected cases. This would far exceed the time limit set out by the Information Commissioner therefore under S12 of the Freedom of information Act 2000 provides an exemption from the obligation to comply with a request for information if the estimated costs of complying with that request would exceed the prescribed appropriate limit.

We estimate that the costs of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit by a significant amount.

For this reason we feel unable to comply with this request.

Q2. How many of those fail to attends were from appointments organised via email or postal communication (2015 - 2018)?

See Q1 answer above

Q3. How many appealed those decisions?

Housing = customer triaged by Community Contact Centre = None. There is no right to appeal if customer fails to turn up for their housing options appointment. The original Firmstep case would have been closed. If customer presents again to the council then the Community Contact Centre would triage the customer again and make them another appointment to see a housing options officer.

Temporary accommodation = see Q1 above

Homemove = There has been no appeals since August 2018. Information not held pre this date.

Q4. How many were rejected and what percentage of those parties were male vs female?

NOTICE OF REFUSAL

The information requested would require us to manually search 3000 customer records and this would far exceed the time limit set out by the Information Commissioner therefore under S12 of the Freedom of information Act 2000 provides an exemption from the obligation to comply with a request for information if the estimated costs of complying with that request would exceed the prescribed appropriate limit.

>We estimate that the costs of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit by a significant amount.

For this reason we feel unable to comply with this request.