Ecological Expertise - Find a freedom of information request

About the access your local authority has to ecological expertise in house. 'In house ecological expertise' is defined as those who are employed by the council on a part-time or full-time basis and who have chartered ecological status (CEcol) In March 2018, it was revealed that only 1 in 4 councils had access to some form of ecological expertise within their own teams.

1. Would you please tell me how many chartered ecologists the council has employed over the last 3 years from May 2018 to May 2021? Would you please provide this figure in terms of FTE equivalence? I would prefer to receive this information electronically, preferably as a data set in excel and not as a PDF, to include the following information as set out below. For example if you have employed only one chartered ecologist 2.5 days a week over the past three years the FTE figure = 0.5 2018-2019 chartered 2019-2020 chartered 2020-2021 chartered 0.5 0.5 0.5

2.As a second part of this request would you please tell me how many 'other environmental experts' the council employs, who are either unchartered but hold position as an environmentalist or hold chartered status in a related discipline e.g some who holds chartered environmentalist (CEnv) status. Would you also provide this figure in terms of FTE equivalence? E.g. if you employed one chartered environmentalist and one unchartered environmental expert full -time between May 2018-May 2020 but then lost one of these between My 2020- May 2021 then the FTE figure would be as follows: 2018-2019 other expertise 2019-2020 other expertise 2020-2021 other expertise 2 2 1

1. 0

2. 4 - 1.6 FTE in each of the years requested