FOI 2026/1793

I am writing to request some information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 about your legal spend on Court of Protection Welfare cases. The information is for my PhD entitled: the Court of Protection: Family Experiences, Media Representation and Social Media activism. I am undertaking my PhD at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. My research has received ethical approval.

As part of my research, I want to gather data on how much is spent on legal fees associated with health and welfare Court of Protection cases.

By ‘health and welfare’ cases, I mean any cases before the Court of Protection which are not about a person’s property and affairs (or a property and affairs deputyship on its own). They could include matters about where a person lives, who they have contact with, any possible deprivation of liberty, medical treatments, welfare deputyship applications, and other welfare matters.

The question I would like to obtain data for is as follows:

1. How much did Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board spend in total on legal fees for external lawyers on welfare Court of Protection cases in the following financial years: 

1. 1^st April 2023 – 31^st March 2024
2. 1^st April 2024 – 31^st March 2025
3. 1^st April 2025 – 31^st March 2026

If it is not possible to separate out external legal fees only, please provide legal fees in total, including in-house costs, for Court of Protection cases. Please specify whether costs are just external or include in- house costs.

If it is not possible to separate out spend on welfare cases, please indicate external legal spend on all Court of Protection cases, or all legal spend on all Court of Protection cases if no separation by category is possible.

1. NHS Greater Manchester ICB (NHS GM) has reviewed your request and considers that it is exempt under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act.

Section 12(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

The Freedom of Information Act allows Public Authorities to decline to answer FOI requests when we estimate it would cost us more than £450 (equivalent to 18 hours, calculated at £25 per hour) to identify, locate, extract, and then provide the information that has been asked for.

NHS GM does not separately record whether legal fee expenditure relates to Court of Protection case, be it a health and welfare case or otherwise. No distinction is made in internally held information between CoP and non-CoP legal costs. To separate these costs out, NHS GM would need to investigate each individual legal fee invoice, and identify whether it related to a CoP case, which may not be possible on the face of the invoice alone.

Therefore, we estimate that the time taken per invoice would equate to an average of 5 minutes per invoice. For 2025/26, NHS GM recorded 1,732 lines of legal fees transactions. To review and identify whether these were CoP cases would take an estimated 144 hours, which would exceed the appropriate limit prescribed in the act.

In line with Section 16 of the FOI Act, please find below a link to the total cost of NHS GM’s legal fees which is reported annually in the Annual Report and Accounts (see note 5 to the accounts).

NHS Greater Manchester Reports | Greater Manchester Integrated Care Partnership