Invoices not paid within 30 days FYs 2017/2018-2022/23 (FOI231168)

Thank you for your email of 24 July 2023, requesting information from Ordnance Survey in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000, as set out in the extract below:

“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 (2017/18 to 2022/23 inclusive) 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."

I confirm that OS does hold some of the information that you have requested above, however, we are unable to comply with your request and provide the information, as we consider the information to be exempt from disclosure under section 12 of the FOIA, as explained further below:

We do not hold all the information you have requested in an easily accessible format, it would require a manual exercise, to determine the appropriate information, locate the information, retrieve it or a document containing it and extract the information, taking in excess of the applicable time limit of 18 hours.

For example, we ran an initial report for 2022/2023, which flagged approximately 2,500 invoices which show payment later than 30 days from invoice date, this initial report shows a vendor number, this would need to be cross referenced with a list of vendors to confirm the supplier, this would then need to be cross referenced for the supplier details and for the reasons for ‘late’ payment. In addition, we would need to check the contractual payment terms for each supplier contained in the contract itself. We would need to establish the reason why payment has not been made within 30 days from invoice date. Not all invoices are required to be paid within 30 days, some have payment terms of 60 or 90 days and there may be other reasons as to why the invoice has not been paid within 30 days, such as the Purchase Order was not raised, or the sums payable are in dispute. It is estimated, it would take a minimum of 10 minutes to verify each invoice for 2022/2023 and cross check this against the other sources of information, for this year alone, this would take approximately 400 hours. We ran the same report which showed that for 2021-2022 we would need to check approximately 2,392 invoices.

As this information is not readily accessible the time spent dealing with the request will exceed a period of 18 hours and we are therefore entitled to refuse to comply with the request pursuant to section 12(1) of the FOIA, where the authority estimates the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

This is an absolute exemption and therefore not subject to the public interest test.

However, under the duty to provide information and assistance in accordance with section 16 of FOIA, we can provide the following information which may assist you in this matter.

With a view to bringing your request within the cost limit, OS can look to provide you with the following information:

• The name of the Supplier
• The date of the invoice
• The invoice reference
• The gross value of the Invoice
• The actual payment date of the invoice

We consider the other supplier information you have requested to be either exempt under section 40(2) (Personal Information), and once you have the supplier name, exempt under section 21 (Information accessible by other means), or it is information we do not held however, we have not relied on these exemptions in this response and will address these points further if we receive a refined request from you.

In relation to:

• 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

To establish if any interest liability were payable due to late payment of an invoice, we would need to check each contract for each supplier, however; we can confirm that no interest has been paid in respect of late payment of invoices for the years you have requested.

We will treat a refined request as a new request for information.