Invoices Paid 30+ Days Apr 2023 to May 2025

Reference: 25-26129

Date response sent: 22/07/2025

Details of enquiry

we request under FOIA that you provide, (preferably in Microsoft Excel or an equivalent machine-readable format) the following information in respect of suppliers which were not paid in within 30 days for the period starting 1 April 2023 to the date of this request:

1. Supplier Name
2. Invoice Date
3. Gross Invoice Value
4. Payment Date
5. Late Payment Compensation or Interest Paid (if any)

Response sent

1. Supplier Name

See column A of the attached csv file

2. Invoice Date

See column B of the attached csv file

3. Gross Invoice Value

See column C of the attached csv file

4. Payment Date

See column D of the attached csv file

5. Late Payment Compensation or Interest Paid (if any)

We do not hold our data in a way that these costs can be electronically searched/retrieved.

At the point of processing, any ate payment charges/penalties are not recorded separately nor differentiated from other payments, and there is no automated mechanism to read the invoice narratives to extract the required data

These details, where held, could only be identified and extracted via a manual interrogation of every invoice processed, as charges would typically be levied on a subsequent invoice to that which was paid late.  In other words, we would not know which invoices included a late payment penalty charge without looking at the description of goods/services on every invoice.

The requested information, where held, would be located on the invoices, which are not stored  in an electronically searchable/retrievable format, (ie there is no automated mechanism for the collation of the required data), and would require manual review and processing of a large volume of data, considerably exceeding the limit to time and resource provisioned under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

Under Section 12 of FOIA the Trust is not obligated to comply with a request for information if we estimate that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours of officer time

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 has set the appropriate limit as £450 based on a generic charge of £25 per hour to determine whether the Trust holds the information, to locate, and then to extract it).

We have estimated that to obtain the requested information, where held, would require a manual search of all invoices processed during the period April 2023 to May 2025  amounting to over 7,300 invoices, which, at an estimated 5 minutes per invoice would take approximately 608hours.

Section 12 of FOIA further states that the authority (ie this Trust) is not obligated to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

This means that as the time required to process your request falls outside the cost limit, your request is refused and exemption from disclosure has been engaged under s12 of FOIA.

Should you wish to narrow the scope of this question, the Trust would treat the submission as a new FOI request.