Social Services Staff Salary /
Ref No:FOI-1617-0020
Q1: Please can you confirm how many of your staff in Social Services earned:
• An annual equivalent salary of £60,000 +; or
• An average day rate of £300+
during the financial year 2014-15?
Can you please split these figures to show those on permanent contracts with the Board, and separately, those who worked on temporary contracts.
Response:
Southampton City Council currently have 6 employees in Social Services which earn over £60k a year, which are all on permanent contracts.
In regards to temporary contracts:
From our preliminary assessment, we estimate that compliance with this part of your request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under the section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). The Section states that a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit; this is currently £450 for a local authority, this represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the authority holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
A manual review of each transaction to suppliers of temporary staff would need to be undertaken in order to determine the daily rate of each member of staff. There are approximately 1800 transactions in Adults Social Care and 4700 transactions in Children’s Social Care. Based on an estimation 30s per transaction to review, this would equate to 15 and 39 hours respectively.
Under section 1(3) of the FOIA, a public authority need not comply with a request unless any further information reasonably required to locate the information is supplied. If a request is too broad or general in nature, then public authorities have a duty to provide advice and assistance to the applicant in order to focus the request.
Unfortunately we are unable to advise how best to narrow down your request on this occasion, because the information is not held in a format that can be easily filtered.
However, if you are able to narrow down your request based on the information provided above, any reformulated request the Council receives from you will be treated as a fresh FOI request.
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