Dear Mr Tyes,

SUBJECT: Freedom of Information Request

Thank you for your email of 16 November 2009, in which you asked for the following information from the Ministry of Justice:

You clarified that this information should refer to prisoners on temporary release from prison which may be granted to prisoners whilst they are serving their sentence in custody.

Your request has been passed to me because I have responsibility for answering requests which relate to prison statistics and has been handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

By way of background prisoners may be temporarily released for compassionate reasons under a Special Purpose Licence if they meet the eligibility criteria and pass a robust risk assessment. This is a short duration temporary release, often at short notice, that allows eligible prisoners to respond to exceptional, personal circumstances and to wider criminal justice needs.

Compassionate reasons include;

The Special Purpose Licence also allows temporary release for other purposes, such as to attend medical appointments and receive hospital treatment outside the prison establishment. Prior to 2006 prisoners granted temporary release for the compassionate reasons listed above were released under `Compassionate Licence', which, like the Special Purpose Licence, enabled temporary release for other non-compassionate reasons.

Full details of the eligibility criteria for Special Purpose Licence are set out in Prison Service Order 6300 Release on Temporary Licence which can be found on the HM Prison Service website using the following link.

http://pso.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/PSO_6300_ROTL.doc

The Department does not hold information centrally on the marital status or category of prisoners released on any type of temporary licence. Therefore, to comply with your request would breach the appropriate cost limit under section 12 of the FOIA.

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.

I estimate that it will take the Department in excess of 3.5 working days to determine appropriate material within the scope of your request, and locate, retrieve and extract that information.

To provide the relevant information at the level of detail you have requested would involve identifying every one of around 8,000 prisoners between 1999 and 2008 released on temporary licence on compassionate grounds. Once identified, a manual trawl of each prisoner's file would be required to ascertain marital status. This would then need to be recorded with gender, prisoner category and the percentage of the custodial period of the sentence remaining when temporary release was granted.

You may wish to narrow the scope of your request in order to try and bring it within the cost limit by being more specific about which information you wish to receive, including any dates or periods of time which are relevant, or by specifying a particular establishment. Please be aware, even if you do refine your request costs may still be incurred, however, each case will be treated on an individual basis.

Outside the scope of the Act, I am happy to advise that information relating to Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL) is already in the public domain. The Department publishes Offender Management and Caseload Statistics (OMCS) annually, and on 31 July 2009, OMCS 2008 was published. Please find links to this publication below:

http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/prisonandprobation.htm

Table 9.6 of OMCS 2008 contains the number of releases on temporary licence by type of licence by year from 1998 to 2008.

As part of our obligations under the FOIA, the Ministry of Justice has an independent review process. If you are dissatisfied with this decision, you may write to request an internal review. The internal review will be carried out by someone who did not make the original decision, and they will re-assess how the Department handled the original request.

If you wish to request an internal review, please write or send an email to the Data Access and Compliance Unit within two months of the date of this letter, at the following address:

Data Access and Compliance Unit

Information Directorate

Ministry of Justice

6^th Floor, Zone B

Post point 6.23

102 Petty France

London

SW1H 9AJ

e-mail: [email address]

If you remain dissatisfied after an internal review decision, you have the right to apply to the Information Commissioner's Office under Section 50 of the FOIA. You can contact the Information Commissioner's Office at the following address:

Information Commissioner's Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Internet: https://www.ico.gov.uk/Global/contact_us.aspx

Yours sincerely,

Dan Welton