FOI_25-236 Consultancy firm spend

Date of response: 08 September 2025

We have now considered your request of 08 August 2025 for the following information:

Please note that this request specifically concerns consulting firms and explicitly excludes individual contractors, such as those hired to teach strategy or architecture, etc.

Question 1. For each of the last three full financial years for which the university’s accounts are available (e.g., 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24), kindly share whether University of East Anglia has hired, retained, contracted or otherwise engaged any consulting firms in the following domains:

• Strategy

• Marketing

• Education

• Architecture

If so, could you also provide the following information, for each year:

Question 2. The amounts paid to the consulting firms in each of the above domains.

Question 3. The names of the firms hired, engaged, retained or contracted in each domain.

Our response:

We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.

Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to spend with consultancy firms, per each requested financial year, for Marketing, Strategy and Education specifically.

We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling 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 spend with consultancy firms, relating to Marketing, Strategy and Education specifically is held within our Finance, Procurement and Governance (Finance) department.

For the period outlined in your request we have identified a total of 5,421 invoices recorded under ‘consultancy’ spend, which may fall into the scope of your request. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual invoice manually.

We have calculated it would take 2 minutes per records, or 180 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual record of an invoice paid. Which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.

Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we would be able to respond to your request in relation to spend with Consultancy Firms, per each financial year requested, in relation to Architecture consultancy only, due to this information being recorded and held separately by our Estates department.

Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.

We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.

We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.