Information Policy Team
Shared Services Directorate
2 Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DF
Switchboard 020 7035 4848 Fax: 020 7035 4745
E-mail: [email address] Website: www.homeoffice.gov.uk
Dr Geraint Bevan
[email address]
February 22, 2010
Ref:11476
Dear Dr Bevan
I am writing with reference to your Freedom of Information request for
information about Databases held by the Home Office and agencies.
First, I apologise on behalf of the Department for the length of time which it is
taking to provide you with a response to your request. As I have previously
explained to you, the legal position is that FoI Act allows us to exceed the
response deadline of 20 working days where this is necessary to consider the
public interest test in relation to one or more of the ‘qualified’ exemptions in
the Act. This is subject to our telling applicants when we expect to conclude
our deliberations and provide a full response. I have written to you on several
occasions to explain the position that we were considering the public interest
in relation to a number of exemptions. However, some of our letters gave
undertakings to provide you with a final response by a certain date, which
were not met. We accept that this would have been frustrating to you and it
would have been better had a more realistic target date been set and adhered
to.
Where the 20-day deadline does not apply, because of the public interest test,
section 10(3) of the Act says that the public authority is not required to
respond to the request ‘until such time as is reasonable in the circumstances’.
This is open to interpretation, but under guidelines published by the
Information Commissioner’s Office a section 10(3) extension should normally
be for no more than 40 working days from the date when we first inform the
applicant that it is being applied. We are now long past that date.
In mitigation, I would make the point that your request for a list of and
information about Home Office databases covers a very wide area and brings
into consideration a number of exemptions in the Act. The range of databases
and the information stored on them has meant that the response to your
request has required clearance from a wide range of sources both within and
outside the Department. If the cost of locating, retrieving and extracting the
information and preparing the response were to be calculated, it would
certainly exceed by some margin the cost limit in the Freedom of Information
and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. This
would be so even if we restricted the databases to those in the core Home
Office, i.e. excluding its agencies.
With hindsight, it would have been justifiable had we declined to answer your
request on grounds of cost under section 12 of the FoI Act.
We shall nevertheless comply with your request, subject to any exemptions
which may apply to some of the information. I cannot give a definite date by
which we expect to respond, but we aim to do so by the end of March. I can
assure you that the response is under active consideration and is currently
undergoing a process of clearance.
Yours truly,
Diana Pottinger
Information Access Team
