FOI request (FOIR-496227112)

Invoices not paid

Requested Mon 13 March 2023
Responded  Thu 13 April 2023

Please may you provide me, in Microsoft Excel or an equivalent electronic format, with a list of invoices that were not paid within 30 days for the last 6 financial years which would feed into the Regulation 113 Notice you are required to publish each year as part of your obligations under The Public Contracts Regulations 2015, with the following information for each invoice (where available):

a. The name of the Supplier

b. Supplier email address

c. Supplier company registration number

d. Supplier postal address

e. Supplier telephone number

f. Supplier website

g. The date of the invoice

h. The invoice reference

i. The gross value of the Invoice

j. The date the invoice should have been paid by

k. The actual payment date of the invoice

l. The total amount of interest liability due to late payment of the invoice

m. The total amount of interest paid to the supplier due to late payment of the invoice

For the avoidance of doubt we request the data behind payment performance summaries for Regulation 113 Notices, not the summaries themselves.

We expect that this information to be readily available and easily accessible in the electronic format requested given the necessity of source.

Response

Notice Of Refusal

The Freedom of Information Act is based on recorded information held by a local authority. If the requested information is not held the local authority must not create it to answer a request. We can confirm that Hastings Borough Council does not hold all the requested information.

The information requested in respect of providing a list of invoices that were not paid within 30 days for the last 6 financial years would far exceed the time limit set out by the Information Commissioner. 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.

Currently we have 7300 entries that would need to be manually checked to ascertain if the supplier is a company or sole trader. We estimate this would take 3 minutes per entry and therefore 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.