I am writing to make a request for information related to your organisation’s attendance at conferences. Please could you provide the following:

1. Over the course of financial year 2023-2024 how much did your authority spend on attending conferences?
2. Which conferences did you fund for people to attend?
3. What are the job titles of people who attended conferences?

Wokingham Borough Council do not hold this information in a a centralised manner and therefore are unable to run a report on it. Each service and team is enabled to allow their staff to attend conferences and workshops that will benefit them without needing to raise this to HR (or elsewhere in the organisation). Some conferences and workshops are free so just require registration to attend. For instance, we are aware that the Data Protection Officer signs up for, and attends, the ICO's Data Protection Practitioners' Conference each year, and more and more staff are also opting to attend this conference where it adds value to their role.

We would therefore need to ask each team and/or officer about attendance which given the number of Officers that we would need to contact would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours to complete the request.