FOI_25-109 Investments by University endowments
Date of response: 09 May 2025
We have now considered your request of 09 April 2025 for the following information:
Question 1. The investments made by your university's endowment in the years 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. (If you need to shorten the timeframe to meet the time/cost limits below which you are required to respond, please feel to do that as appropriate. If current data is the only available information, then please provide me with that.)
Please break the above data down by the monetary value of your endowment invested in each entity.
Our response:
Unfortunately, on this occasion it is not possible to provide any of the requested information for question 5. We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling some of the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.
'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve, and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.
Information relating to investment funding is held within our Finance, Planning and Governance – Finance Division (FPG-FIN) department and on our behalf by our investors. There is no central record of where this information is held.
For the period outlined in your request we have established there are innumerable records which may fall into the scope of your request, and we have established that even identifying all of the exact information you seek would take us over the statutory time limit.
To explain our position, the records we hold include but are not limited to funds, trackers, and pools, and both the composition and market values of these investments will fluctuate frequently. The only way of identifying, extracting, and recording the exact information you seek in relation to a list of investments made ‘by’ the university’s endowments, including their market/monetary value of the investment in each entity, would be to interrogate the records we hold to determine if the information falls within the scope of your request. We would also need to liaise and consult with our funding and endowment managers to retrieve any information held on our behalf.
We have calculated it would take more than 25 hours minimum to identify, locate, manually interrogate, retrieve, record and liaise with our providers and funding managers. This exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.
Unfortunately, due to how our endowments and investment information is held, we are not able to refine or shorten the requested years to just one year’s worth of data, in order to provide any data to you.
We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.