Policing Portfolio & Governance Team

Police Reform Unit

6th Floor, Fry Building, 2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF

Direct Line 020 7035 1896

E-mail [email address] www.homeoffice.gov.uk

Our Ref 43131

Your Ref

Date 14 April 2010

Dear Mr Sittampalam,

Thank you for your e-mail of 10^th March 2009, in which you asked for copies of contracts and agreements listed in a Hansard extract provided through a previous request for information.

I am writing further to my e-mail of 10 February 2010 concerning your request for copies of agreements relating to Home Office grants to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). Your request has been handled as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We are now in a position to provide a reply to your request.

I am able to disclose the information set out in the attached PDR documents (numbered 1-8). As previously indicated, we worked down the list of Home Office grants as recorded in the Hansard written answer which you referenced in your original request for information. We carried on working until the cost limit was met. Therefore, the information is not complete but is the most we could identify within the reasonable cost limit.

For your information, I enclose an updated list of Home Office grants to ACPO. This was amended in 2009, to reflect an error relating to the Operation Sycamore entry.

You will note that the documents do not strictly adhere to the order of the Hansard list - for example, we were unable to track down the documents for the Domestic Extremism Project or all documents relating to the Community Tensions Project in the time available. As I hope you can appreciate, working down the list in a strict order only (i.e. requesting the first round of documents and waiting for their receipt before requesting the next) would have been overly time consuming and would not have been an efficient way of dealing with your request. Some documents were easier to recover than others, and so whilst we have stuck with the list as far as was possible, the inevitable approach of requesting several different documents simultaneously means that some were received and others were not. This approach was discussed and agreed as reasonable with the Information Access Team in the Home Office (who upheld your appeal against our original rejection of your request for information on costs grounds).

In keeping with the Freedom of Information Act, we assume that all information can be released to the public unless it is exempt. In line with normal practice we are therefore releasing the information which you requested via the Home Office website.

Most of the documents listed for disclosure have been redacted under section 40(2) of the Act in order to remove the names and contact details of junior officials. This is in absolute exemption that does not require further consideration.

ACPO, as a private limited company, are not legally subject to the Freedom of Information Act. We have respected their wishes in terms of which names to redact, though my understanding is that names have been redacted in line with seniority (i.e. junior ACPO officials' names were redacted, but not senior officials). We have also redacted ACPO's bank account details.

I would like to assure you that we have provided you with all relevant information that the Home Office holds and was able to recover within the cost limit.

If you are dissatisfied with this response you may request an independent internal review of our handling of your request by submitting a complaint within two months to the address below, quoting reference 14131. If you ask for an internal review, it would be helpful if you could say why you are dissatisfied with the response. I am happy to talk to you about our response if you wish to contact me at the telephone number given above.

Core Home Office and IPS cases:

Information Access Team

Home Office
Ground Floor, Seacole Building

2 Marsham Street

London SW1P 4DF

e-mail: [email address]

As part of any internal review the Department's handling of your information request will be reassessed by staff who were not involved in providing you with this response. If you remain dissatisfied after this internal review, you would have a right of complaint to the Information Commissioner as established by section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act.

Yours sincerely

Benedict Collins

Policy Advisor

Police Reform Unit

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WORKING TOGETHER TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC

Ganesh Sittampalam