Staff flights

Request

Please include the following information for the following financial years 2022/23,2023/24 and 2024/25:

• A list of all flights taken by employees and board members, including the following details:
  • The airline
  • The class (e.g. economy, business, first)
  • The departure airport and destination
  • The cost
  • The dates of travel
  • The name of the hotels stayed at, if possible
  • The cost of any other expenses.

Outcome

Request refused.

Response

It has been determined that the request in its current form remains too broad both in terms of the information being requested and the timeframe covered. The request has therefore been refused under section 12 of the FOI Act.

Under section 16 of the FOI Act a public authority is required to provide advice and assistance to help the requester in the revision of a request refused under section 12, if it is possible to provide such advice.

You may wish to consider refining your request through reconsideration of the timeframe covered and exact details requested.

Although you have the right to request any information you wish, please be advised that we have identified the part of the request about hotels and ‘the cost of any other expenses’ as the most problematic to resolve within the cost limit. It is not possible to link expense data to data relating to specific flights/trips in an automated way, and any manual attempt to extract such information manually would likely far exceed the cost limit. Similarly, information regarding the names of hotels would likely require extensive manual searches to be conducted, and information may not be recorded consistently.

For this reason, if you would like a refined request to be as similar to the original as possible, we would suggest you consider refining your request to a list that covers:

• The airline
• The class (e.g. economy, business, first)
• The departure airport and destination
• The cost
• The dates of travel

Furthermore, we would advise that any new request is limited to flights organised and paid for by TNA. Information on flights paid for and organised by third parties is likely to complicate the location and extraction of information, due to the way this information is stored. It is not producible via an automated report.

Please note that some information about flights taken by senior staff members has already been published by The National Archives and can be seen in the following links if of interest:

Directors’ expenses in the 2024-5 financial year will be due to be published at a later date.

Please note that we are unable to guarantee that any refined requests would fall within the cost limit. This will depend on the nature of any refined request.

If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request or the decision which has been reached, you have the right to ask for an internal review.  Internal review requests must be submitted within two months of the date of this response.

Annexe

Exemptions applied

Section 12: Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed an appropriate limit, which for central government departments like The National Archives, is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending just over three working days determining whether the department holds the information, as well as locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

We estimate that it will take us in excess of this time to identify the appropriate information, and locate, retrieve and extract it as the scope of your request is too wide-ranging. Therefore, your request will not be processed further.

You may wish to consider refining your request. However, please note that we are unable to guarantee that any refined requests would fall within the cost limit.

Further guidance on the application of this exemption can be found here.