Number of judicial reviews made against the PHSO at the end of the review process.

Dear Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman,

In December 2017 the PHSO legal team informed me of the following:

'If you wish to appeal the Ombudsman's decision then you have a period of three months in which to issue judicial review proceedings, this is from the date of the final decision. This is not extended if you request that the decision is reviewed. If you go over that three month period you are likely to be considered by the Court as out of time. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY IN WHICH YOU CAN LEGALLY CHALLENGE THE OMBUDSMAN DECISION.'

The above clearly states that you can ONLY legally challenge the Ombudsman's decision at the stage of the final decision, NOT at the stage of the outcome of a review of that decision.

Bearing in mind the above quoted statement: how many individuals, in the last three years, have made an application for judicial review AFTER the PHSO had completed its review process?
Of those, how many were granted permission to proceed to a full hearing?

Yours faithfully,

M Boyce

informationrights@ombudsman.org.uk, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman


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InformationRights, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Dear M Boyce

Thank you for your email requesting information held by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

Your request will be responded to in line with the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

A response will be sent to you on or before 18th June 2018 in line with the statutory timeframes set out in the Act.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information/Data Protection Team
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
W: www.ombudsman.org.uk

dangos adrannau a ddyfynnir

InformationRights, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Dear M Boyce

 

RE: Your information request: R0000021

 

I write in response to your email of 18 May 2018 in regards to your
request for information held by the Parliamentary and Health Service
Ombudsman (PHSO). Your request has been handled under the Freedom of
Information Act 2000.

 

Your request was as follows:

 

How many individuals, in the last three years, have made an application
for judicial review AFTER the PHSO had completed its review process? Of
those, how many were granted permission to proceed to a full hearing?

 

Response

 

This information is not held centrally. To try to ascertain this
information for a three year period would involve locating and manually
accessing each litigation case to see if the matter had been for review
along with cross referencing with our Customer Care Team. This work would
be extremely labour intensive and could not be conducted without incurring
disproportionate cost. Section 12(1) of the Act has therefore been applied
to your request.

 

If you believe we have made an error in the way I have processed your
information request, it is open to you to request an internal review.  You
can do this by writing to us by post or by email to
[1][Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman request email] . You will need to specify what the
nature of the issue is and we can consider the matter further. Beyond
that, it is open to you to complain to the Information Commissioner’s
Office ([2]www.ico.org.uk ).

Yours sincerely

 

Freedom of Information/Data Protection Team

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

W: [3]www.ombudsman.org.uk

 

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Dear Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman's handling of my FOI request 'Number of judicial reviews made against the PHSO at the end of the review process.'.

To suggest that locating this very small amount of information would be 'extremely labour intensive' is utter nonsense. I am asking you to look again and reconsider. If you still think it would exceed the cost limit then please refine the search down to the last year (May 2017 -May 2018), or even further down to the last six months if need be. If you still argue that this would be 'extremely labour intensive' then I will take the matter to the ICO for them to see if they agree. All your judicial review 'claims' should be stored in one place and be easily accessible. If this is not the case then you are needlessly making your job more difficult and more expensive than it needs to be, and more importantly you are denying the public access to recorded information which should be readily accessible to you. If the PHSO started to work in a smart and organised way you could save the tax-payer a fortune and you could make your decision-making much more transparent. Everyone would win - except perhaps the PHSO, where transparency is in very short supply.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/n...

Yours faithfully,

M Boyce

informationrights@ombudsman.org.uk, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman


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Gadawodd C Rock anodiad ()

Mr Boyce - many including me have asked on previous occasions for performance/management data which you would have reasonably considered to be immediately available in any professional business, and information was denied on similar grounds.

It could be put down to an antiquated management setup, or possibly due to an effort to hide or loose what does not make good reading.

It begs the question. It does seem inefficient that PHSO does not have finger on the pulse of its decisions and appeals thereof.

Gadawodd M Boyce anodiad ()

The senior caseworker who conducted the review of my decision could not tell me whether my completed review had been upheld or not. He said he didn't normally conduct reviews and didn't really know what he was doing. He said the PHSO legal team would inform me. The legal team are now refusing to answer this very simple question. All this speaks for itself. My MP keeps dragging his feet about writing to the PHSO to simply ask whether the review was upheld or not. I am very close to making a serious complaint about him also. This country is run by a bunch of corrupt clowns.

Gadawodd M Boyce anodiad ()

Today I also received the PHSO legal team's reply to my letter before claim under the pre-action protocol for my second application for judicial review. Here's how they like to play with words.

In my final decision the PHSO said that HMRC had fully considered central document A. In the PHSO's review they said the opposite, that HMRC had chosen not to consider central document A because in their words 'it was not part of the ROLE of HMRC to consider this document.' I then argued to the legal team that it clearly was within the remit of HMRC to consider document A (and indeed all relevant documents to their enquiry). The legal team then said: 'we deny that we have said in our review that consideration of document A was outside the remit of HMRC, but we did say that it was outside of their role. We consider that HMRC has not demonstrated any misconduct in this regard.'
My second judicial review will aim to demonstrate to the judge that there is no substantive difference between the words 'remit' and 'role' - that they effectively mean the same thing. The PHSO adamantly declare that the two words do not have the same meaning, and that the senior case worker who declared to me that he didn't have much experience of dealing with reviews was right to use the word role instead of remit as the former has a very different meaning to the latter.

If you thought politician's were experts at spin, they have nothing on the PHSO.

Gadawodd C Rock anodiad ()

This is the tangle the PHSO leads you in to - and themselves. They rely on weasel words that can always be denied later on whatever grounds the current trend of the agenda is.

It comes back to the total incompetence of the PHSO to actually understand about their role/ remit in the first place. All the time the PHSO faffs about, more people line up with the same complaints of maladministration/ negligence of role/ remit. If there is any real problem with what is said or what has 'slipped out', the person who gave that opinion "has moved on / moved off " avoiding the fact that they were not fit for role (remit) in the first place.

It grieves me that the harm continues, as if it's something 'which shall never be faced'. People are harmed, and people die for want of a bit of honesty.

Missing the plot: The point is that harm is stopped NOT that 'face is saved'.

Gadawodd M Boyce anodiad ()

Agreed C Rock. You state:

'If there is any real problem with what was said or what was 'slipped out', the person who gave that opinion 'has moved on/moved off' avoiding the fact that they were not fit for the role (remit) in the first place.'

These incompetents are usually moved 'sideways' into 'non-jobs' where they are not a 'fire-risk'. My caseworker was moved into the role of Public Affairs and Insight Officer. Who is receiving the insight? Well it won't be the public.

Dear Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman,

A response from you is now well overdue. Please provide a response within the next 3 working days or I will refer the matter to the ICO.

Yours faithfully,

M Boyce

informationrights@ombudsman.org.uk, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Thank you for contacting the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s (PHSO) Freedom of Information and Data Protection Team. This is to confirm we have received your request.
If you have made a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or Environment Information Regulations 2004, we will respond to your request within 20 working days in accordance with the statutory time frames set out in both Acts.
If you have made a request for personal information held by the PHSO, your request will be processed as a Subject Access Request under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 2018 and will be responded to within one calendar month in accordance with the statutory time frame set out in the Act.
We may contact you before this time if we require further clarification or if we need to extend the time required to complete your request.
For Subject Access Requests, we will send any personal information via secure email, unless you instruct us differently. To access the information on the email we send, you will need to sign up to our secure email service. Details can be found on our website using the link below:
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InformationRights, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

3 Atodiad

Dear M Boyce,

 

Internal Review of Freedom of Information Request (R0000021)

 

I write in response to your email of 12^th June in which you request an
Internal Review of our response to your Freedom of Information request. I
have reconsidered your request and our response to you.

 

Timeliness of Response

 

The response to your request was within the 20 working days stipulated by
section 10(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

 

Information Provided

 

Your request was refused under section 12(1) of the Act due to the amount
of time that would be required to provide you with the information
requested. Section 12 of the Act allows public authorities to refuse to
deal with any request that would exceed the cost limit of £450 (18 hours).

 

I have made enquiries to determine if the exemption was correctly applied
and if we are able to provide you with information within the cost limit.

 

As stated in our response, the information you have requested is not held
in a way that the requested information is easily retrievable.

 

The information is stored within two separate systems. The first system
contains 300 files that could potentially involve litigation, it would
entail a manual trawl to identify which ones do. I estimate it would take
5 minutes for each file to establish which files were litigated, also 15
to 30 minutes to locate the information if a file did involve litigation.
I estimate it could take 25 hours to identify files, then for example if
15 to 20 files are within scope of your request when located another 15 to

30 minutes to go through each file to locate the information. I would
estimate it would take 30 to 35 hours to go through these files.

 

In addition there are approximately 110 files in another application that
relate to litigation. An officer would be required to trawl through each
of these files taking between 15 to 30 minutes to search on each file.
Time required would be between 27.5 to 55 hours.

 

In total the time required would be 57.5 to 90 hours.

 

I have considered if we would be able to provide you with information over
a smaller period of time but unfortunately as files are not kept by date
reference but by name the same searches would need to be undertaken and
the s12 exemption would still apply.

 

Conclusion

 

For the reasons set out above I maintain the exemption used in our
original response as to provide the information requested would incur a
commitment of resources in excess of the limit of £450 set by the Freedom
of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulations 2004 (SI No. 3244 of 2004), which equates to 18 hours of work.
Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act provides that a public
authority is not obliged to comply with a request where to do so would
exceed such a limit.

 

If you remain unhappy with our response, it is open to you to complain to
the Information Commissioner’s Office ([1]www.ico.org.uk).

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Andrew Martin

Freedom Of Information/Data Protection Manager

Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

W: [2]www.ombudsman.org.uk

 

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Gadawodd M Boyce anodiad ()

It is now very clear that the PHSO refused to supply the requested information because it would further expose their sham review process.
Because the review process is not legislated for it has no basis in law. You simply cannot legally challenge (judicially review) a review because it has no legal standing. The PHSO chooses to conduct reviews outside of its legislation, and therefore because reviews are not covered by legislation they cannot be judicially reviewed.The sham review process exists only to deceive and attempt to mollify complainants. It is now time for them to finally admit this and admit that they have been deceiving people for many years.

Dear Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman's handling of my FOI request 'Number of judicial reviews made against the PHSO at the end of the review process.'.

I am going to give you a final chance to provide the information I requested.

You state that you would have to search through over 400 files to be able to locate the information I requested and that this would take you over 100 hours. This is so ridiculous it almost beggars belief.

Firstly, why would you need to search over 400 files? You clearly only have to search through the files where a complainant has made an application with the High Court for judicial review of a PHSO decision. As you correctly allude to there have been about 15-20 of these over the last three years, and you will know their names. Are you really suggesting that the PHSO legal team does not have this information and cannot very readily and very quickly retrieve it?

Then you state that it would take you about 35 hours to go through these 15-20 files to locate the requested information. Who would you have looking for this information? Even someone with a reading age of a 1 year old would be able to locate the requested information in no more than a few minutes.

I am sending this request to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today for them to begin an investigation. If you chose to now provide the information then I will instruct the ICO that it need not continue with an investigation.

Please bear in mind the cost to the tax-payer of an investigation by the ICO simply because the PHSO are being obstructive.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/n...

Yours faithfully,

M Boyce

informationrights@ombudsman.org.uk, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Thank you for contacting the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s (PHSO) Freedom of Information and Data Protection Team. This is to confirm we have received your request.
If you have made a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or Environment Information Regulations 2004, we will respond to your request within 20 working days in accordance with the statutory time frames set out in both Acts.
If you have made a request for personal information held by the PHSO, your request will be processed as a Subject Access Request under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 2018 and will be responded to within one calendar month in accordance with the statutory time frame set out in the Act.
We may contact you before this time if we require further clarification or if we need to extend the time required to complete your request.
For Subject Access Requests, we will send any personal information via secure email, unless you instruct us differently. To access the information on the email we send, you will need to sign up to our secure email service. Details can be found on our website using the link below:
www.ombudsman.org.uk/about-us/being-open...
If you require us to post your personal information to you instead you will need to inform us of this and confirm your current address as soon as possible.

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Gadawodd A.E. anodiad ()

It's a pretence that they have a quality control process. They don't have one, because it's all circular assurance.

Hope you are making a submission to the PACAC inquiry as the deadline is 20th December!

https://www.parliament.uk/business/commi...

Gadawodd M Boyce anodiad ()

Yes A.E. I am making a submission to PACAC. My submission will be about the sham review process. Sadly I suspect that PACAC will not discuss this matter and will probably not even publish my submission. The second clerk to PACAC, Ian Bradshaw, has already told me on the phone that PACAC will categorically not look into the PHSO review process. We will see.