Statistics about names

Dear Sir or Madam,

I would like to make a request for some information from the
Identity and Passport Service's records of UK residents.

What I would like to know is, for each first name / surname
combination, what the incidence of that name combination in the UK
population is.

What I would envisage in terms of a reply is a table with three
columns: First name, Surname, and in the third column, the number
of people found during the census with that first name and surname
combination. An Excel spreadsheet would be an ideal format, but csv
or similar will be acceptable if that is not possible.

Please do get in touch if you have any queries about this request.

Yours faithfully,

Susan Davis

Dear Mr Hughes,

Thank you for your reply clarifying the scope of the records which
you hold. Please could you therefore process my request
substituting the phrase "UK passport holders" for the phrase "UK
residents".

Yours sincerely,

Susan Davis

Dear Mr Hughes,

Could you let me have an update on the current status of my
request?

Many thanks,

Susan Davis

Dear Identity and Passport Service,

I do not understand your reply - I think you may have sent it to me
in error. I am sure that you have a database with the first names
and surnames of all passport holders, and I am sure that this
database is able to be queried to determine the statistics which I
am asking for. If the responsehas not been sent to me in error,
please could you explain why performing this query on the database
is not possible?

Yours sincerely,

Susan Davis

Dear Identity & Passport Service,

I would be grateful for a reply to my email of 24 Nov (copied below
for information)

Yours faithfully,

Susan Davis

Dear Identity and Passport Service,

I do not understand your reply - I think you may have sent it to me
in error. I am sure that you have a database with the first names
and surnames of all passport holders, and I am sure that this
database is able to be queried to determine the statistics which I
am asking for. If the responsehas not been sent to me in error,
please could you explain why performing this query on the database
is not possible?

Yours sincerely,

Susan Davis

Dear H Reid,

Thank you very much for your reply. I am afraid I'm still not sure
I understand your reply. To help me understand, please could you
answer two questions?

a) do you have a database containing the first names and surnames
of all passport holders?

b) is is possible to perform queries on this database in order to
extract data?

Yours sincerely,

Susan Davis

Dear Helen,

Many thanks for your reply. I would be grateful if you could expand
on the reasons why it is not possible to perform queries on the
database - 'operational reasons' is quite a broad term and it would
be useful to know in more detail what these reasons are.

Yours sincerely,

Susan Davis

Dear Identity & Passport Service,

I don't believe I've received a reply to my email of 3 February -
could you let me know how you're getting in with preparing a
response?

Many thanks,

Susan Davis

Dear Identity & Passport Service,

I don't believe I've received a reply to my email of 3 February.
Have you received my earlier request for an update? Please could
you let me know how you're getting in with preparing a response?

Many thanks,

Susan Davis

Dear FoI team,

Thank you very much for your reply. Could you clarify some points.
You say that the database is in use 7 days a week, but not that it
is in use 24 hours a day. Are there any periods out of business
hours when the database has quiet periods, when the query can be
scheduled to run?

If this is not the case, I think it is fairly likely that snapshot
copies of your database exist and that these will not be in
constant use. You might for instance have these for backup,
recovery, systems incident investigation, or testing purposes.
Would it be possible for you to run the query against one of these?
I appreciate that this would not give completely up to date data,
but that would be fine for my purposes.

Yours sincerely,

Susan Davis

Dear Identity & Passport Service,

I don't appear to have received a reply to my email of 26 April.

Yours faithfully,

Susan Davis