Chris – that wording was straight off our intranet from the FOI section. If it’s wrong I can’t say, but it is the advice given to officers by our FOI section so that’s what we follow.
I’ve asked if provision of signal information constitutes FOI and have been told no. We still charge for the provision – again not my decision – I do as I am advised to do.

The £450 is a limit of any charge made. If a request is likely to exceed the £450 limit it should be broken down into more manageable parts each of which will be subject to the £450 limit.

For Derby the rules are:
The Council will estimate how long it will take to process an information request.
We calculate the time/hours both officers and external contractors are expected to spend processing the request. The cost will be calculated at £25 per hour per person, regardless of the actual cost or rate of pay. The calculation of the appropriate limit of £450 is equivalent to about 2.5 days of one person’s time charged at the £25 per hour rate. We will take into account the time taken to …
 Determine if the we hold the information.
 Find the information or documents containing the information.
 Retrieve the information or documents.
 Extract the information from the document.

Im surprised that charge hasnt been challenged yet. It is after all public information we are obliged to provide.

I dont offer technical reports for insurers – I recommend they engage the services of a third party consultant for that sort of work with us just providing all the raw data.

Im in the process of getting all of our asset information digitised to be made available online – will reduce the need for data requests to be administered in the first place if its freely available.

Freedom of Information Act requires all public documentation to be available and if necessary explained, so Im not sure we CAN charge for that sort of information? Especially if that information takes less than 18 hours to clarify.

Its something that I want the UTMC systems providers to start developing to their public facing web publishing modules – a facility to download documents pertaining to a site as well as a link to the fault list / historical fault list from the FMS.

Hell, if a website like FlightRadar can track and record each flight across the world, why cant the systems companies come up with a way of logging stage replies from UTC so that signal operation at a particular date and time can be played back?