Dear Sir or Madam,

Please could you give me the number of people who have been
declared persistent or vexatious correspondents by the DCSF and the
former DfES over the past 10 years. Please could I have the figures
separately for each year.

Yours faithfully, Anne Jago

Dear Ms Jago,

I am writing to confirm that the Department has now completed its search
for the information which you requested on 25 July 2008 on the number of
people the DCSF has declared to be a persistent or vexatious
correspondent.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is committed to
responding to enquiries from members of the public in a timely and
professional manner. Any decision to cease corresponding is not made
lightly, and officials are obliged to seek the permission of the
Permanent Secretary's Office before this occurs.

In such cases, a final reply will be sent out informing that any further
correspondence on that subject matter will not receive a reply. The
decision not to respond will always be linked to a particular issue, so
if an individual were to write in with a query on a different subject,
we would continue to correspond with them.

The Department's Public Communications Unit holds a list of individuals
where permission not to respond upon a particular subject has been
received from the Permanent Secretary's Office. There are 28 names
recorded on the list. Due to the manner in which the information is
recorded, it is not possible to provide a breakdown by year. Please note
also that this figure represents correspondence dating back to 2003 as
the Department does not hold correspondence prior to that date.

To show this figure in context, in the 2007-08 financial year alone the
Department responded to 62,461 enquiries from members of the public by
letter or by email.

'Vexatious' has a particular meaning under the Freedom of Information
Act. A vexatious request is determined by the information requested, not
the person making the request. An individual can make as many requests
for information as he/she wishes, and cannot be labelled as vexatious -
each request must be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Since the inception of the Act, the DCSF and its predecessor department
have received no FoI requests which have been classified as vexatious.

The information supplied to you is protected by the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988. Most documents supplied by this department will
have been produced by government officials and will be Crown Copyright.
You are free to use it for your own purposes, including any
non-commercial research you are doing and for the purposes of news
reporting. Any other reuse, for example commercial publication, would
require the permission of the copyright holder and is regulated by the
Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005. You can find
details on the arrangements for re-using Crown Copyright at:

The Information Policy Division,
The Office of Public Sector Information
St Clements House
2-16 Colegate
Norwich NR3 1BQ

Tel: 01603 621 000.
email: [email address]

If you have any queries about this letter, please contact me. Please
remember to quote our reference number in any future communications.

If you are unhappy with the service you have received in relation to
your request and wish to make a complaint or request a review of our
decision, you should write to me within two calendar months of the date
of this letter.

If you are not content with the outcome of your complaint, you may apply
directly to the Information Commissioner for a decision. Generally, the
ICO cannot make a decision unless you have exhausted our
complaints/review procedure.

Yours sincerely,

Phil Turner
Public Communications Unit

Your correspondence has been allocated the reference number
2008/0067944.

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