Dear C Moyo,

Freedom of Information request - Internal Review

I am writing about your request for an Internal Review of our handling of your Freedom of Information Request.

As you are aware, section 10(1) of the Freedom of Information Act requires that we respond to requests within 20 working days. Your request was received by us on 20 March 2009 and the statutory date for our response to you was 22 April 2009. I am aware that you have not yet received a substantive reply to your request and it is clear to me that we have not met our obligations under the Act. This was a failure on our part to keep you properly informed of the progress of your request. I hope you will accept my apologies for the significant delay in responding to you, and for our failure to keep you fully informed.

The questions you asked are rather complex and cover a very broad subject area. UK Border Agency deal with various types of applications, most of which have different requirements and process time. I would like to ask you to specify what type of application you are referring to so we can provide you with a response. Once we receive this information we will deal with your request as a matter of priority and send you a response as soon as possible.

In the request you sent to our team I note that you also enquired about how the UKBA handles complaints. You can find full details about how complaints are handled on our website at: www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/contact/makingacomplaint. For further information about UKBA and the work that we do you can obtain this on our website which is www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk.

I fully recognise that in the handling of your case the Home Office has failed to meet its obligation to respond within 20 working days as set out in section 10(1) of the FOI Act. I offer my sincere apologies for this, but hope that you will be reassured by the fact that once you clarify what sort of application you are enquiring about we would aim to deal with your request as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely,

O. Awosanya

Information Access Policy Team

Freedom of Information