FOI release

FOI2025/00008S LinkedIn Spend

Published 13 March 2025

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 - REQUEST REF: FOI2025/00008S 

Thank you for your email of 25 February 2025 asking for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000. You asked: 

I would like to request the following information: 

1. The total costs incurred by the department on LinkedIn in 2024 and 2025, broken down by month. 

A clarification request was sent to you on 5 March 2025 regarding the meaning of ‘total costs,’ e.g. limited to LinkedIn membership fees, or include costs associated with LinkedIn advertising.’  You subsequently provided the following information: 

Both please. Break them down.   

I am writing to confirm that we have now completed the search for the information which you requested.   

I can confirm that FCDO Services does hold information relevant to your request, as set out below. 

Following your clarification, we can break down our response into two parts: 

Membership fees: FCDO Services does not pay a subscription fee direct to LinkedIn.  

LinkedIn advertising costs: Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit. The limit has been specified in the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.  

For central government the appropriate limit is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one or more persons spending 3½ working days in determining whether the Department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting it. Your request, as presently formulated, is widely-framed and I estimate that it will take more than 3½ working days to locate, retrieve and extract this information. In these circumstances we are not obliged under the Act to comply with your request.  

You may therefore wish to refine your request to narrow its scope to bring it within the appropriate limit, e.g. narrow the timeframe to within the past 6-months.  

Please note that any new request will be given a separate reference number and we will then consider whether we can provide the information requested within the appropriate cost limit.  This would of course be subject to the consideration of whether any of the other exemptions under the FOI Act apply.   

Once an FOI request is answered, it is considered to be in the public domain.  To promote transparency, FCDO Services may now publish the response and any material released on GOV.UK in the FOI releases section.  All personal information in the letter will be removed before publishing.  

Where copies of information have been supplied to you they will continue to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.  You are free to use it for your own purposes, including any non-commercial research you are doing and for the purposes of news reporting.  Any other re-use, for example commercial publication, would require the permission of the copyright holder.  Most documents supplied by the FCDO will have been produced by government officials and will be protected by Crown Copyright.  To re-use Crown Copyright documents please consult the Open Government Licence v3 on the National Archives website. 

Information you receive which is not subject to Crown Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. You must ensure that you gain their permission before reproducing any third party (non-Crown Copyright) information. 

If you would like to request a review of our decision, you should write to the Data Protection Officer (DPO), Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) Team, FCDO Services, Hanslope Park, Milton Keynes, England, MK19 7BH (e-mail: FCDOServices.DataProtectionOfficer@fcdo.gov.uk).  Please note you have 40 working days to do so from the date of this letter. Please quote the reference number above in any future communications. 

If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint, you may then apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision.  Generally, the Information Commissioner cannot make a decision unless you have exhausted the complaints procedure provided by the FCDO. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at: Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF, or online at: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/  

Yours sincerely, 

FOI Officer 

Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) Team 

FCDO Services