Dear Mr Hosking

Thank you for your email of 22 December seeking additional information about the Duchy of Cornwall's exclusion from the Freedom of Information Act 2000 ('the Act').

`Public authority' has a specific definition for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act. It is defined there as any body listed in Schedule 1 to the Act or a `publicly-owned company'. The Duchy of Cornwall is not listed in Schedule 1. Nor is it a publicly-owned company as defined in section 6 of the Act. This means that the Duchy is not a public authority for the purposes of the Act.

The FOI Act includes powers for Ministers to designate additional organisations as public authorities for freedom of information purposes by orders, either under section 4 which applies to bodies created and partly appointed by the Crown or by government etc, or under section 5 which applies to bodies that carry out public functions. The Government has no plans to bring the Duchy of Cornwall within the scope of the Act.

You asked the Ministry of Justice specifically to provide you with all information that could elucidate the exact constitutional status of the Duchy of Cornwall and validate or not its exemption to the FOI Act. Such information as is held by the Ministry and is relevant to that request has, however, already been provided to you, in response to your email of 3 August 2007. In that email you requested 'All information held by the Ministry of Justice that relates to the constitutional status of the Duchy of Cornwall and its relationship to the territory of Cornwall'. The reply sent on 31 August 2007 by Linda Henshaw quoted two paragraphs of information held by this Department and referred you to an answer given on 6 March 2007 to a Parliamentary Question from Andrew George MP, as well as to files held by The National Archives.

Further explanation and a reference to a further Parliamentary Question dated 29 March 2007 was sent to you on 19 November 2007. In replies dated 13 March and 15 and 20 May 2008 we repeatedly explained that the Ministry of Justice holds no further information relevant to your original or subsequent requests. Meanwhile, it was confirmed to you in a letter of 21 November 2007 from the Department's Access Rights Unit that the department's decision - embodied in Linda Henshaw's reply dated 31 August 2007 - had been internally reviewed and found correct. Similar findings from further internal reviews were reported to you in letters dated 24 April 2008 and 1 August 2008.

The Ministry of Justice holds no further information it can provide under the FOI Act that could elucidate the exact constitutional status of the Duchy of Cornwall. We consider your request to be identical or substantially similar to the request you made in 3 August 2007 and subsequent requests from you. Furthermore we do not consider that the period between your latest request and our previous responses to your requests for information and for internal reviews has been such that you could reasonably expect the situation to have changed. We are therefore refusing your request of 22 December 2008 under section 14(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, which states:

"Where a public authority has previously complied with a request for information which was made by any person, it is not obliged to comply with a subsequent identical or substantially similar request from that person unless a reasonable interval has elapsed between compliance with the previous request and the making of the current request."

The Information Commissioner's Office has recently published updated guidance on the use and interpretation of this section, whihc is accessible by typing 'repeated requests' into the 'search' function box on their website, www.ico.gov.uk.

As part of our obligations under the FOI Act, 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

1st Floor, Zone 1 C

Post point 1.41

102 Petty France

London

SW1H 9AJ

e-mail: [email address]

Yours sincerely

J M Hawkes (Ms)

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