Freedom of Information Act Request
Reference: ECC19947203 03 26
Response: 24 March 2026
I can confirm that Essex County Council does hold some of this information, and where we are able to release this, our response is listed below.
This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
For research purposes, please provide the following information held by your local authority:
For clarity:
“requests” refers to all initial requests for an EHC needs assessment, regardless of outcome.
“plans issued” refers to final EHCPS issued, excluding draft plans.
Weekly data may be provided using iso week numbers or weeks commencing on a consistent day (e.g. Monday), provided this is stated.
If the information is not held in weekly form but is held with date-level granularity, please provide the data aggregated by week.
If weekly data cannot be provided without exceeding the cost limit, please instead provide the most granular time period readily available (e.g. monthly), and briefly explain why weekly data cannot be supplied.
Please provide the information in an electronic, machine-readable format such as CSV or EXCEL.
If any part of this request is refused, please specify the exemption(s) relied upon and explain why they apply.
If clarification would help to process this request, or if the request risks exceeding the appropriate cost limit, please contact me so that I may refine it.
Question 1 - The number of requests for an Education, Health and Care (EHC) Needs Assessment received by the Authority, broken down by week, from 1 January 2022 to the present date.
Question 2 - The number of final Education, Health and Care Plans issued, broken down by week, over the same period.
I can confirm that Essex County Council does hold this information, however from our preliminary assessment, we estimate that compliance with your request would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This is currently £450. This limit is calculated 18 hours of work at a cost of £25 per hour.
The information you have requested is not available because it is not held in a reportable format and producing it in the weekly breakdown you require would involve manually reviewing and extracting data from our records. This process would require us to go through lines of excel data that would need to be cross referenced with another system and we estimate it would exceed the 18‑hour statutory time limit set out under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000
This letter acts as a Refusal Notice in respect of your request.
Under section 16 of the Act, our duty to assist those requesting information we advise that you should consider reframing your request to bring it under the cost limit. As you have stated that if we are unable to provide it as a weekly, I have provided the information as monthly.
Please note that if you were to submit a series of smaller requests, we may still refuse to provide the requested data. Regulatory guidance states ‘The Act recognises that freedom of information requests are not the only demand on the resources of a public authority. They should not be allowed to cause a drain on your time, energy, and finances to the extent that they negatively affect your normal public functions.
When calculating the costs of complying, we can aggregate (total) the costs of all related requests we receive within 60 working days from the same person or from people who seem to be working together.’
If you would like to submit a reframed request which falls below the cost limit, or if you would like advice and assistance, then please do not hesitate to contact us and we will provide further support
Your Right to Know
Democracy and Transparency
Essex County Council
Telephone: 033301 38989
Email: YourRight.ToKnow@essex.gov.uk | www.essex.gov.uk
