Dear Mr Walker,

We wrote to you on 12 March concerning your Freedom of Information request about the decision to ban Mr Geert Wilders from entering the United Kingdom.

We explained that the information requested must be considered under the exemption contained within section 27(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act. This exemption is a qualified exemption which means that a public interest test is used to balance the public interest in disclosure against the public interest in favour of withholding the information under the qualified exemption. Under Section 10(3) of the Act we extended the 20 day response period in order to carry out the public test and informed you that we now hoped to respond to you by 16 April.

We are considering your information request however a further extension is required in order to consider the public interest test fully. I apologise for the delay in dealing with your request and assure you that we are dealing with this as a matter of urgency. We hope to send you a substantive reply by 14 May 2009.

Should you have any queries about the handling of your information request then please do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours sincerely,

S Goddard

Information Access Policy Team

UK Border Agency