Information Access Team
Information Management Service
Financial & Commercial Group
2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF
Switchboard 020 7035 4848
E-mail: [email address] Website: www.homeoffice.gov.uk
Mr. William Thackeray
Case Ref:
CR 12138
[FOI #7571 email]
Date:
1st July 2009
Dear Mr. Thackeray,
I write in response to your email to the Home Office dated the 5th June 2009 in which
you redefined the scope of you previous FoIA request (C11139) concerning the
details of gifts, donations and offer of hospitality made to the Home Office by
Scientology organisations over the past five years. You wil recall that we were
unable to confirm whether or not the information you had requested was held by the
Home Office because doing so would exceed the cost limit provisions explained in
s12 of the Act.
In your email of the 5th June 2009 you requested that we conduct searches for the
same information as your previous request but asked us not to search for any
records that might be held by the Criminal Records Bureau, the Home Office Human
Resources Directorate, and the Office for Security & Counter-Terrorism.
Your redefined request has been handled as a new request under the Freedom of
Information Act and I can today provide you with a substantive response to your
request.
Unfortunately, we are stil unable to comply with your request on the grounds that, to
provide you with confirmation as to whether or not the information you have
requested is or is not held, would exceed the cost limit provided by the Secretary of
State in the Freedom of Information Appropriate Limit & Fees Regulations 2004 –
the regulations referred to in s12(5) of the Act.
As I discussed in Annex A of my previous letter to you (dated the 29th May 2009),
information on gifts and hospitality is not held centrally, but by each individual policy
unit. In order to ascertain whether or not the Home Office holds the information you
have requested would again require many Home Office officials to work concurrently
to determine whether or not the information you have requested is actually held.
Whilst I am happy to acknowledge that you have tried to redefine your request to
avoid the cost-limit provisions of the Act by limiting the number of directorates or
groups you would like us to search, I’m afraid that conducting searches of the
remaining areas of the department would stil exceed the cost limit by a significant
margin.
If I may again refer to my previous email to you, we have estimated that to conduct a
search of the second-largest part of the Home Office – the Crime & Policing Group
(CPG) – would, alone, exceed 22 hours of work to locate and collate any information
that may be held.
It is not Home Office policy to maintain a central hospitality and gifts register, but for
records on any gifts and/or hospitality to be held by the particular policy unit that
received that offer. In this instance, the cost-limit is exceeded because of the
number of individual units that would have to search to provide you with any
confirmation that the information you have requested is or is not held.
We are therefore unable to comply with your request for information under the
provisions of s12(2) of the Act.
As I mentioned previously, you may be interested to learn that the Cabinet Office
has recently published a list of hospitality received by the board members of various
government departments in 2007 and includes contributions from fourteen Home
Office Board members. This information is listed on page 46 of the publication
available here -
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/propriety_and_ethics/civil_service/hospitality.aspx
The Home Office has recently released some information from our Gifts and
Hospitality Registers in response to another Freedom of Information Act request.
This request covered information held about Senior Civil Servants in the Home
Office (excluding our delivery agencies (UKBA, IPS and CRB)) and is available on
the Home Office website - http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/freedom-of-
information/released-information/foi-archive-about-
us/11482_gifts_hospitality_received
I realise that this reply may be a disappointment to you, but I look forward to hearing
from you again should you wish to refine your request further.
Thank you for your interest in the Home Office.
Yours sincerely,
Ian Lister
Information Access Consultant
Information Access Team
ANNEX A – Your Right of Complaint
If you are dissatisfied with this response you may request an independent internal
review of our handling of your request by submitting your complaint within two
months to the below address quoting reference CR 12138:
Information Access Team
Information Management Service
Home Office
4th Floor, Seacole Building
2 Marsham Street
London
SW1P 4DF
Alternatively, you can email:
[email address]
During the independent review the department’s handling of your information
request wil be reassessed by staff who were not involved in providing you with this
response. Should you remain dissatisfied after this internal review, you wil have a
right of complaint to the Information Commissioner as established by section 50 of
the Freedom of Information Act.
