Dear Mr Tyes,

RE: Request for an Internal Review

Thank you for your email dated 30 November in which you expressed dissatisfaction with the Department's response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and asked for an Internal Review of that decision. Your request has been passed to me for investigation as I carry out Internal Reviews for the Ministry of Justice MOJ related matters.

The purpose of an Internal Review is to assess how your Freedom of Information request was handled in the first place.

On 12 October 2009 you asked for details of how many male prisoners have been allowed to make babies by artificial insemination of their wives/partners in each of the last 10 years? And how many female prisoners have got pregnant in each of the last 10 years?

On 23 November MOJ replied to your request informing you that the information that you request is held but it was estimated that it would take more than 3.5 working days to do so and therefore be exempt under section 12 of the FoIA (disproportionate costs exemption).

I have reviewed the way in which your case was handled and I have looked at the basis of the original decision.

The information you requested with regard to `how many male prisoners have been allowed to make babies by artificial insemination of their wives/partners in each of the last 10 years?' is held by the MOJ but it is considered that the information is exempt under Section 40(2) of the FOIA (Personal Information).

The reason for applying this exemption to the information is, if a request is made regarding numbers of people and the resulting figure is so small that, by a process of deduction, an individual could be identified, the Ministry Of Justice considers that the disclosure of the information would contravene Section 10 of the Data Protection Act 1998 or any of the data protection principals and therefore, should not be disclosed.

Your request for details on `how many female prisoners have got pregnant in each of the last 10 years' is held by MOJ but is exempt under Section 12 of FOIA (costs).

I have reviewed the way in which your case was handled with regard to the application of Section 12 to your request and have looked at the basis of the original decision and I have concluded that the judgement to apply the exemption to the request was correct.

Section 12 of the FoIA makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit, which for central government is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3.5 working days in determining whether the Department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

The information that you have request covers 13 female prisons plus 4 that did hold females but no longer do, over a 10 year period and this information is not collated centrally. The data would need to be extracted from each of those prisons separately and I consider that it would take MOJ more than 3.5 working days to do so and therefore be exempt under section 12.

To give you some idea of the scale of the task, it is estimated that 40,000 files would have to be interrogated separately to extract the information that you have requested.

In our response to you on 23 November, it was suggested that you narrow the scope of your request by limiting it to one establishment to try to bring it within the cost limit. This would not apply to your first question that was refused under Section 40(2) but may bring question 2 within limit. However, please be aware that due to the nature of your request the cost limit may still be engaged.

I am sorry that I am unable to present you with the information that you requested under the Freedom of Information Act but I hope that the Internal Review has clarified why it has not been possible to provide you with any information you have requested.

If you are dissatisfied with the findings of this internal review, you can complain to the Information Commissioner, at the following address:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Yours sincerely

Roger Davies

Data Access & Compliance Unit