NFRS 2023 30 - Invoices not paid within 30 days

You asked for

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):

• The name of the Supplier
• Supplier email address
• Supplier company registration number
• Supplier postal address
• Supplier telephone number
• Supplier website
• The date of the invoice
• The invoice reference
• The gross value of the Invoice
• The date the invoice should have been paid by
• The actual payment date of the invoice
• The total amount of interest liability due to late payment of the invoice
• 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 data which must have been required to prepare and produce the Regulation 113 Notice.

If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, or for another reason, please provide advice and assistance, under the Section 16 obligations of the Act, as to how I can refine my request.

If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact me via email or phone and I will be very happy to clarify what I am asking for and discuss the request, my details are outlined below:

Our response

Answer: - This information is not recorded in an easily retrievable format. To locate, retrieve and extract the requested information requires a manual search of all records held, we would have to examine our financial system manually this is because currently the system does not have a specific field for disputed invoices, this is being altered in the future but currently a manual review is required to answer the questions put to us in bulk. An initial search revealed a total of 5,000 to 6,000 invoice records over a one financial year period. With an additional 25,000 to 30,000 records for the remaining five financial years.

It is estimated that to search one record would take approximately 10 minutes which would equate to approximately 416 working hours (for one years’ worth of records) and amounts to 52 days’ worth of work. This takes the request over the cost threshold of 18 working hours and engages Section 12 (1) of the Act.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 with Section 12(1) of the act being applied.

12.– (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

Should you wish for the Force to continue with your request, a more accurate figure will be provided within a fee’s notice. The cost will need to be paid by you, prior to any further. Please advise if you wish to proceed.

Alternatively, you are invited to refine your request to bring it within the cost threshold, due to how the information is currently recorded Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service are unable to provide any reasonable refinement that would bring the request within the cost threshold. However, going forward we are seeking to amend recording practices to include fields to search for disputed invoices going forward and data from that point will be retrievable.

In accordance with the Act, once one part of the request exceeds the cost threshold the entire request exceeds the cost threshold.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17 (5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. investigation.