FOI request details

Request

Subject: Student Council May 2022 - August 2022

Reference: LBR-FOI-00404

Two students (D and S) who were class N exempt from Council Tax are being pursued for Council Tax by Richmond Council for the dates between the 21st May 2022 to the 31st August 2022, yet there are hundreds of analogous St Mary's University students all with the same class N Council Tax exemption who all had tenancy agreements in the borough of Richmond until the 31st August 2022.

Can you please tell me in total how many of these analogous students Richmond Council has claimed are liable for council tax and how many of these students have you collected council tax from between the 21st May 2022 - 2022?

Response

None Disclosed - 9 February 2023

In any typical year, Richmond Council will have between 800 and 1,000 council tax accounts awarded either a Class N Student exemption (all occupants are classed as a student) or a 25% disregard discount (all occupiers except 1 are classed as a student). For each of these council tax accounts, there could be 2, 3 or more occupants who have needed to prove student status by providing a certificate, or 'Student Council Tax Letter' from their educational establishment. Please note it is not the University etc who supply us with the certificate, it is the student, therefore we do not receive these certificates in bulk format, they are received individually.

Although the Council monitors the number of accounts with either the student exemption or disregard discount, it does not record the overall total number of students contained within these accounts, or the educational establishments at which they are studying, as there is no legal reason to do so.

Therefore, to ascertain how many of these thousands of students were studying at St. Mary's University would require each individual student to be found on our database and document records checked for each, which would take approximately…

1,000 accounts each with 3 student occupiers on average = 3,000.

Time to run report to extract the accounts with either a student exemption or disregard discount for the years 2020, 2021 & 2022 = 1 hour

Time to check each account and look in document records for certificate showing place of study for each student occupier of those accounts = 3,000 x 5 mins = 15k mins = 250 hours.

We are unable to provide this information as we consider the cost to do so would exceed the FOI appropriate limit, as specified in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004; therefore section 12(1) of the Act applies.

The appropriate limit has been set at £450 and may include working hours of any person acting on our behalf at a rate of £25 per hour. This equates to 18 hours to locate and extract the relevant information.

Please note that our responses were accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of release, and have not subsequently been updated. This information should be considered an historical record only.