How many companies with 10 employees or less in Wales have refused to fill out the annual purchase survey and the monthly business survey

You asked

Please can you provide me with the following information.

a. how many companies with 10 or less employees within the Garment decoration/wholesale business based in Wales have been selected to fill out the annual purchase survey twice or more since 2017.

b. how many companies with 10 or less employees within the Garment decoration/wholesale business based in Wales have been selected to fill out the monthly business survey since 2017.

c. How many companies have you imposed a fine who have refused to fill out the surveys since 2017

We said

​Thank you for your request.

In order to fully answer your request, we would be required to go into hundreds of individual files to discover how many companies we have fined for refusing to fill out specifically the annual purchase survey and the monthly business survey since 2017. The cost limit for replying to a Freedom of Information request is £600 or 24 hours work, and in our view we would need to exceed this with your request.

We would therefore request limiting the scope of your request so that we can answer within the cost limit. This can be done by asking for the total number of companies fined for all surveys across that period, rather than breaking down by particular survey.

We would also like to advise that the information requested in parts A and B of your request would produce very low numbers and therefore would be considered personal information. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. Therefore, we would be unable to disclose the number of companies in the Garment decoration/wholesale business in Wales with 10 employees or less that have been selected to fill out our annual purchase and monthly business surveys. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individual businesses can be identified, Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) would apply.