Individual Placement and Support (IPS) services for individuals within drug and alcohol treatment services.

Please provide the following information regarding Individual Placement and Support (IPS) services commissioned by the Council for individuals within drug and alcohol treatment services.

Please provide annual breakdowns for each of the last three financial years (2023/24, 2024/25, and 2025/26).

Questions Requested

1. Client Cohort: The total number of individuals enrolled as clients of the IPS service in each of the past 3 years.

2. Job Starts: The total number of job starts achieved by IPS clients in each year.

3. Job Retention: The number of jobs sustained for 13 weeks or more in each year.

4. Data Collection Method: Does the Council (or its contracted IPS provider for drug and alcohol service users) maintain the following logs:

a) A record of job starts for IPS service users that includes the date of employment and the specific employer name?

b) A record/log of all employer engagement activities undertaken on behalf of clients?

5. Employer Engagement (EE) Linkage: Of the recorded job starts in each year, how many were achieved with employers for whom the IPS service had recorded prior employer engagement activity in its employer engagement log? This can be achieved by cross referencing the names of the employers listed in your job starts log with the names of your employer engagement contact entries.

Legal & Operational Guidance for Processing

To assist your team and prevent unnecessary delays or invalid procedural refusals, please note the following statutory and technical framework under FOIA:

1. Data Held "On Behalf Of" the Council - Section 3(2)(b) If the Council's IPS service is delivered via a commissioned third-party provider (e.g., a charity, private contractor, or NHS Trust), all operational data, client logs, job start tracking, and employer engagement records generated to fulfill that contract are legally held on behalf of the Council under Section 3(2)(b) FOIA. Directing the applicant to a contracted provider or stating "information not held" because data resides on a provider's database fails to discharge the Council's statutory obligations. The Council is required to request these operational figures from its provider to answer this request.

2. Electronic Records & Cost Limit Parameters - Section 12 Standard IPS fidelity frameworks require providers to maintain electronic records: specifically, the IPS Grow Tracker/Spreadsheet (recording job starts) and Employer Engagement Logs (Excel spreadsheets or CRM records detailing employer contacts).

Cross-referencing an electronic job start list against an electronic employer contact log is a straightforward relational check.

At a standard administrative rate, cross-referencing 50 job starts against an electronic employer log takes approximately 30 minutes (over 1 minute per job start).

For a standard local authority IPS drug and alcohol service (typically generating between 15 and 80 job starts per year), this matching exercise will take under 1 hour in total. Refusing Question 4 under Section 12 (the 18-hour cost limit) is legally unsustainable unless the service has achieved over 1,000 job starts within the request period.

3. Alternative Raw Disclosure Format - Section 11

If the Council maintains that cross-referencing these two electronic logs constitutes "creating new information," I formally request under Section 11 FOIA that the Council fulfill Question 4 by providing raw, anonymised exports of the two underlying electronic files:

The IPS Grow job start log (detailing start dates and employer names).

The Employer Engagement log/tracker (detailing contact dates and employer names).

To ensure full compliance with Section 40 (Personal Data), all individual client names should be redacted, and real company/employer names across both spreadsheets can be replaced with consistent dummy identifiers (e.g., "Employer A", "Employer B"). This allows independent verification of pre-employment engagement while fully protecting personal data.

1. Lincolnshire was included in Wave 3 of the programme, with implementation commencing in 2024/25. As a result, three years of data are not available. At present, only data for 2024/25 can be reported, as data for 2025/26 are not yet available.

The total number of individuals enrolled as clients of the IPS service in Lincolnshire in 2024/25 was 91.

2. As Lincolnshire was part of Wave 3 implementation, the programme commenced in 2024/25. Consequently, only data for 2024/25 are currently available for reporting, as data for 2025/26 have not yet been published. These data are expected to become available between November 2026 and February 2027.

3. As Lincolnshire was part of Wave 3 implementation, the programme commenced in 2024/25. Consequently, only data for 2024/25 are currently available for reporting, as data for 2025/26 have not yet been published. These data are expected to become available between November 2026 and February 2027.

The number of jobs sustained for 13 weeks or more in Lincolnshire in 2024/25 was 52.

4 a&b. We have interpreted this question as asking whether records of job starts and employer engagement activity undertaken on behalf of clients are maintained by the Council or its commissioned provider, rather than requesting anonymised copies of those records. On that basis, the responses to questions 4a and 4b are yes.

Providing copies of these logs would require the Council to create a new version of the records with all personal information removed and redacted. As the Freedom of Information Act does not require public authorities to create new information in order to respond to a request, anonymised copies of the logs are not held in this format.

5. We are unable to provide this information, as data for periods prior to 2024/25 is not held because Lincolnshire was a Wave 3 implementer.