Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many staff in her Department are responsible for (a) processing and (b) responding to Freedom of Information Act requests; and if she will make an estimate of the annual cost to the public purse of this work.

The Home Office has a central team consisting of 13.7 FTEs managing FOI requests and related appeals work. The annual salaries paid to this group of staff were approximately £663K in the year ending September 2024.

To determine precisely how many staff are responsible for processing and responding to FOI requests across the entire department and to provide an estimate of the resulting costs, is not feasible for the purposes of answering this question, in particular because the majority of these staff will carry out such work as part of their overall responsibilities.

However, if we consider that the Home Office dealt with 6115 resolvable FOI requests in the year ending September 2024 (the most recent data available) and that each resolvable request cost a maximum of £600 to process (the current FOI cost limit), then we can conclude that the cost of processing FOI requests over that twelve month period was a maximum of £3,669,000.