Response 3963469
Response to request for information
Reference
3963469
Response date
20 April 2026
Request
I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 in relation to the Land East of Gamston / North of Tollerton Strategic Urban Extension (“SUE allocation”), including but not limited to planning applications 20/03244/OUT and 24/00347/HYBRID.
Please provide copies of all documents held by Rushcliffe Borough Council which contain, constitute, refer to, or summarise any of the following in connection with the SUE allocation or either of the above planning applications:
- Cost plans - Any cost plan or cost plans, whether prepared internally or by an external consultant, including drafts, partial costings, preliminary estimates, or updated iterations.
- Financial or development appraisals - Any:
- financial appraisal
- development appraisal
- residual land value appraisal
- costed development scenario
- financial modelling or spreadsheet-based calculations prepared for, by, or supplied to Rushcliffe Borough Council.
- Infrastructure cost estimates Any documents containing infrastructure cost schedules or estimates,
including:- highway and junction works
- Section 106 contribution calculations
- utilities or service upgrades
- land remediation
- abnormal development costs
- transport or access infrastructure cost forecasts
- Affordable housing assessments. Any document assessing:
- the relationship between development costs and affordable housing delivery
- the effect of infrastructure or abnormal costs on affordable housing provision
- Consultant correspondence and reports. Any correspondence, reports, advice, or meeting notes from or to external consultants, including but not limited to:
- Porter Planning Economics
- BNP Paribas Real Estate
- Arcadis
- Ward Williams
- Bruton Knowles
- any quantity surveying, cost consultancy, or development economics firm relating to development costs, infrastructure costs, cost assumptions, financial appraisals, or costed delivery of the SUE allocation or its component applications.
- Independent reviews or audits Any independent review, critique, audit, or appraisal of any of the documents described above, whether commissioned by Rushcliffe Borough Council or received from another public body or consultee. Clarification note the Council’s previous response to FOI 3671486, stating that no “viability assessment” had been submitted with the planning applications. For avoidance of doubt, this request:
- does not seek documents titled “viability assessment”;
- covers all cost-related documents of any type, regardless of the terminology used;
- includes documents not formally submitted through the planning portal;
- includes any documents held by officers, managers, external consultants, or partner bodies acting on behalf of the Council.
Response
Thank you for your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). You requested a substantial amount of information relating to the Land East of Gamston / North of Tollerton Strategic Urban Extension (“SUE allocation”), including but not limited to planning applications 20/03244/OUT and 24/00347/HYBRID. The request was made under 6 headings relating to cost-related documents of any type.
Your Request: Please provide copies of all documents held by Rushcliffe Borough Council which contain, constitute, refer to, or summarise any of the following in connection with the SUE allocation or either of the above planning applications:
- Cost plans - Any cost plan or cost plans, whether prepared internally or by an external consultant, including drafts, partial costings, preliminary estimates, or updated iterations.
- Financial or development appraisals - Any:
- financial appraisal
- development appraisal
- residual land value appraisal
- costed development scenario
- financial modelling or spreadsheet-based calculations prepared for, by, or supplied to Rushcliffe Borough Council.
- Infrastructure cost estimates Any documents containing infrastructure cost schedules or estimates,
including:- highway and junction works
- Section 106 contribution calculations
- utilities or service upgrades
- land remediation
- abnormal development costs
- transport or access infrastructure cost forecasts
- Affordable housing assessments. Any document assessing:
- the relationship between development costs and affordable housing delivery
- the effect of infrastructure or abnormal costs on affordable housing provision
- Consultant correspondence and reports. Any correspondence, reports, advice, or meeting notes from or to external consultants, including but not limited to:
- Porter Planning Economics
- BNP Paribas Real Estate
- Arcadis
- Ward Williams
- Bruton Knowles
- any quantity surveying, cost consultancy, or development economics firm relating to development costs, infrastructure costs, cost assumptions, financial appraisals, or costed delivery of the SUE allocation or its component applications.
- Independent reviews or audits Any independent review, critique, audit, or appraisal of any of the documents described above, whether commissioned by Rushcliffe Borough Council or received from another public body or consultee. Clarification note the Council’s previous response to FOI 3671486, stating that no “viability assessment” had been submitted with the planning applications. For avoidance of doubt, this request:
- does not seek documents titled “viability assessment”;
- covers all cost-related documents of any type, regardless of the terminology used;
- includes documents not formally submitted through the planning portal;
- includes any documents held by officers, managers, external consultants, or partner bodies acting on behalf of the Council.
Refusal Notice under section 12(1) FOIA – Cost Compliance Exceeds Appropriate Limit.
The right of access to information is modified by a number of provisions including section 12(1) of the FOIA which provides:
12. - (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit for local authorities has been set at £450 (equivalent to 18 hours of officer time charged at a flat rate of £25 per hours) by The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. The following tasks can be taken into account when estimating officer time:
- determining whether you hold the information;
- locating that information or a document which may contain the information;
- retrieving the information or a document containing it; and
- extracting the information from a document containing it.
The Council estimates that it would take far in excess of 18 hours to deal with your request. This has been determined by considering the scope and nature of the information requested, which includes 7 separate aspects for a broad range of information and documents with no prescribed time periods. It is not possible to identify reasonable search criteria for much of the request.
Method of Calculation: The estimate of the officer time has been calculated based on the actual time taken to retrieve one set of documents related to an early cost analysis exercise relevant to question 1 of your request. Locating and retrieving this information took a senior planning officer 2 hours. This was only part of the search that would need to be undertaken to comply with the cost plans request alone (question 1). For the full scope of the request, the search and retrieval of documents from all systems would, of necessity, be followed by a manual operation to separate disclosable financial information from that which is not relevant. By extrapolating this timescale by the scope of the search required, even if an arbitrary time limit of 6 years is applied, we estimate it would take in excess of 30 hours of officer time to comply with this request.
Aggregation of Requests: In determining the cost estimate of complying with a request, the Council is entitled to consider any similar request submitted by the same requester, or requester group, within 60 working days of the receipt of a current request. This is set out at Regulation 5 of The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244 which states: 5.-
(1) In circumstances in which this regulation applies, where two or more requests for information to which section 1(1) of the 2000 Act would, apart from the appropriate limit, to any extent apply, are made to a public authority-
(a)by one person, or
(b)by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign, the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the total costs which may be taken into account by the authority, under
regulation 4, of complying with all of them.
(2) This regulation applies in circumstances in which -
(a)the two or Estimating the cost of complying with a request – aggregation of related requests more requests referred to in paragraph (1) relate, to any extent, to the same or similar information, and
(b)those requests are received by the public authority within any period of sixty consecutive working days.
(3) In this regulation, “working day” means any day other than a Saturday, a Sunday, Christmas Day, Good Friday or a day which is a bank holiday under the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971(1) in any part of the United Kingdom.
While the cost of complying with the current request is estimated to exceed the appropriate limit, the Council wishes it to be noted that these costs can be aggregated with the cost of complying with your request of 4 February 2026 (FOI request 3899054).
Council’s Decision: The estimate of the cost of compliance has been formulated in line with Regulation 4 of the 2004 Regulations and the ICO guidance to public bodies on calculating estimates that are reasonable, sensible and realistic. The Council relies on this exemption and will not be making a disclosure of the information requested. Section 12 of FOIA provides an absolute exemption and no public interest test has been applied.
Although the request of 19 March 2026 is made under the FOIA 2000, the Council has considered whether the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR) may apply. In line with ICO guidance (where different access regimes apply) the request was considered first under FOIA first and then the EIR implications were considered. If the EIR is applied, then the Council relies on the exception at EIR Regulation 12(4)(b) which states:
12(4) …, a public authority may refuse to disclose information to the extent that - (b) the request for information is manifestly unreasonable.
The tests for EIR regulation 12(4)(b) relies on similar logic to the test for section 12 of the FOIA. And the Council relies on similar reasoning in the application of this exception.