You asked
Please could you provide the following information:
1) The total amount spent on team building activities, away days and other social actives designed to foster cohesion among staff in each of the following financial years:
a) 2013/14
b) 2014/15
c) 2015/16
d) 2016/17
e) 2017/18
f) 2018/19 to 13 November 2018
2) For each of the above years, please provide:
a) A list of each team building activity completed by your staff in that year
b) The amount spent by your authority on each of these activity in that year
c) The number of staff that took part in each activity in that year
d) The accounting line description of the activity
e) A brief description of the activity completed (taken from invoices or other centrally held record, to ensure the request falls within cost. If it is impossible to do this within cost, please disregard this question
We said
Thank you for your request
Unfortunately we do no not hold this information.
We do not have a coding category within the structure of our chart of accounts that allows us to monitor the requested expenditure specifically and we are not obligated to report separately on this to Cabinet Office or via our Annual Report and Accounts. The costs related to this query would generally fall either into ‘miscellaneous’ within our accounting system (which has a wide ranging and significant number of entries each financial year) or would be paid for via a Government Procurement Card (requiring us to review 72 months worth of statements line by line). Were these accounts to be reviewed for this information we would be producing information which we do not currently produce and would entail specialists to review all of the accounting records.
We are satisfied that the necessary financial governance exists through our systems based delegations and approvals workflow.