Dear Judicial Office for England and Wales,

How many times in the past 3 years has the Judicial Office chosen to ask a GLD lawyer to perform an admin task when they already have 15 lawyers on their staff roll?

Yours faithfully,

Dudley Jones

Dear Judicial Office for England and Wales,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Judicial Office for England and Wales's handling of my FOI request 'Number of times the JO has requested the assistance of a GLD lawyer when they have 15 lawyers on their staff roll

Your 17 April FOI Response to my Request of 17 March 2022 – ‘How many times in the past 3 years has the Judicial Office chosen to ask a GLD lawyer to perform an admin task when they already have 15 lawyers on their staff roll?’ – is a clumsy and devious attempt to evade/avoid your responsibilities under the FOI Act. You say you will not respond because my request for information is ‘vexatious’.

‘Vexatious’ is usually the last refuge for an organisation desperate to avoid revealing information that would be embarrassing and damaging, and not able to come up with any plausible reason for rejecting it. You allege that my request has the ‘potential’ (an interesting word that could justify almost anything) to cause a ‘disproportionate (‘disproportionate’ in relation to what?) or ‘unjustified level of disruption, irritation or distress’.

I fail to see how my very straightforward request could produce ‘disruption’, and I think the ICO, openDemocracy, and readers of this request will find your claim unconvincing. ‘Irritation’? It would only be irritating if you had something you wanted to hide. Ditto ‘distress’.

The ICO link you provide is ‘no longer available’ – it raises questions about the professionalism of a department that can’t be bothered to check the availability of ICO web links they provide.

The next 2 wordy paragraphs merely repeat at greater length what you’ve already said. You then say your ‘vexatious’ claim is based on 4 “broad” issues:

1) The burden impose by the request (on the public authority and its staff)
2) The motive of the requestor
3) The value or serious purpose of the request and
4) Harassment or distress of and to staff.

You go on to say that an ‘admin’ task is so ‘wide in scope that it could not be defined’. Really? How is it then that this ‘admin task’ seemed to present no such difficulties to you in your FOI Response of 18 October 2021 where you stated:

‘It is therefore quite common and not untoward, for Judicial Office officials to assist judicial leaders with some of the ADMINISTRATIVE functions associated with their role.’

When you say ‘judicial leaders’, I assume you mean judges, usually Chamber President Judges who – like Chamber President Judge Mrs Justice Farbey - has a P.A. to ‘assist’ her, as well as JO officials. When you say ‘JO officials’ do you mean lawyers, or do you employ administrative staff? If the latter, how many administrative staff are on your staff roll?

And if you are going to employ one Data Privacy Officer who provides crucial data privacy legal information to a JCIO investigator about alleged data privacy rights violations by a judge, shouldn’t that Data Privacy Officer have some legal qualifications/DP Professional Certificate qualifications? And shouldn’t that DP Officer point out that the JO is compromised by having acted on behalf of the Judge who has had serious misconduct complaints made about her? Or does the JO feel they shouldn’t be bound by these legal niceties?

Given your problems with ‘admin tasks’ with my ‘current’ FOI Request, how is it that you could respond very clearly and unequivocally to my September 2021 FOI Request about ‘admin tasks’? It caused you no problems then, but 8 months later, it mysteriously represents an intolerable burden on your staff – one that causes them ‘harassment and distress’?

I find 2) troubling. You talk about the ‘motive of the Requestor’. I was under the impression that ICO rules state you are not allowed to ‘speculate’ about the ‘motive’ of a Requestor. Can you confirm whether or not I am correct? If the ICO rules have changed, I still find the wording of this section puzzling. If I concentrate on your central proposition rather than something that seems imported to try to buttress a very unconvincing argument (namely a previous, related Request, the language of which – at the time – you didn’t find ‘emotive’), then we are left with:

‘The MoJ [not the Judicial Office?] believes from the TONE of the request that this FOI Request has no serious purpose’.

‘Tone’ is a word usually used by literary critics discussing/analysing a poem. ‘Tone’ here is an entirely irrelevant consideration. What you are obviously saying is that my request – ‘How many times in the past 3 years has the Judicial Office chosen to ask a GLD lawyer to perform an admin task when they already have 15 lawyers on their staff roll?’ – has no serious purpose. I, and I think the ICO, would disagree - as would members of the public reading this Response.

Are you seriously saying that a question which seeks to discover how much money the JO is wasting on pointless, unnecessary activities, ‘has no serious purpose’? Activities which clearly do not require a lawyer’s specialist skills and – even if they did – could obviously be handled by one of your own 15 lawyers. GLD lawyers are funded by the fees paid by you and other departments (who don’t have ANY lawyers on their staff roll). Their GLD fees are very high, and are ultimately paid by the taxpayer. In an FOI Response last year, you revealed that the Judicial Office spent £362,000 on GLD lawyers’ fees last year.

At a time when ordinary working people are faced with soaring energy bills, with food prices rocketing and a government unable to mitigate the effects of a cost-of-living crisis, the JO has the temerity to say my Request 'has no serious purpose’.

Returning to your theme of my ‘anger’ and your ‘distress’, your speculate about my ‘motive’ (which may be a breach of ICO regulations) saying my current FOI Request is ‘motivated’ by what is ‘in MY OPINION an inappropriate and unnecessary instructions to the GLD by officials in the Judicial Office’.

You are absolutely right. It is motivated by those ‘inappropriate and unnecessary instructions’ – unnecessary instructions which, if replicated on a number of occasions would result in a very large, unjustified bill for the taxpayer. The JO doesn’t want to admit that, it likes to operate as a rogue agent, that’s why my Request causes its staff so much ‘distress’. But, uncomfortably for you, my ‘opinion’ about ‘unnecessary instructions, is supported by irrefutable evidence.

In what I feel is an unwise tactic, you seem intent on advertising my example about an ‘unnecessary’ recruitment of a GLD lawyer for what I – and most people – would define as an ‘administrative task’. Under your section about my request being ‘too wide in scope’ you say:

‘The MoJ (who am I dealing with? I make my request to the Judicial Office and I get a Response sometimes from the MoJ and sometimes, the Judicial Office) ‘can confirm, and clarify that the Judicial Office would disagree that a letter from GLD lawyers (on instructions from JO) to be an admin task.’

If that is the case, the MoJ and the JO have little respect for the facts and the truth. I state only verifiable facts, not unsubstantiated assertions. The factual email evidence proves that the Judicial Office instructed Chris Dyton, senior GLD lawyer to convey a message from Judge Farbey refusing me permission to publish online an admin letter she’d sent to me on 15 April 2020. I had first requested permission on 20 September 2020. My request was ignored, my email was not even acknowledged. I again requested permission on the 9 December 2020. I said if I had not heard from the Judge by the 30 December (40 days after my initial request) I would assume she had no objection to my publishing the letter, and go ahead.

On the 29 December, I received a letter from GLD senior lawyer, Chris Dyton saying he ‘had been instructed by the Judicial Office to contact me and inform me the Judge had refused her permission for me to publish the letter. I subsequently pointed out that a) the Judge was either too lazy or indifferent to send me an email refusing permission, or instruct her PA, Elizabeth Portas to email me, and b) why did the JO lawyer not tell the Judge to carry out this admin task herself… rather than breach her Code of Conduct by failing to observe the ‘separation of powers’, and c) if the JO/MoJ asked the very expensive GLD senior lawyer, Dyton, to do any more than convey an admin message to me, then they were acting illegally and 5) weren’t any of the JO’s 15 lawyers qualified to carry out this admin task?

The last section from the MoJ – or the JO: ‘value or serious purpose of the request’, I will not dignify with a response other than to say your complacent assertion that the JO has ‘safeguards on expenditure and hiring of GLD lawyers’, and you have ‘financial costing mechanisms that ensure that GLD lawyers are only used when it is ‘appropriate and necessary', is staggering. I have proved this is a dishonest assertion.

The claim that my FOI Request is ‘vexatious’ is a smokescreen for hiding information that would be embarrassing to reveal. Everything about this response is devious and evasive. You are clearly intent upon subverting the Freedom of Information Act, and if your internal review does not reverse your refusal to provide the information I have requested, I will have no hesitation in referring this matter to the ICO.

The contempt you have shown for the FOI Act reminds me of the Cabinet Office’s attitude towards the FOI Act. I’m sure you are aware that the CO was fined £500,000 by Judge Hughes last year for its abuse of the FOIA, including ‘evasion, deception, and prevarication’. They were condemned by the ICO, and by David Davis MP. Credit must go to the openDemocracy campaign group and their lawyers Leigh Day whose legal action against the CO lasted 3 years. I shall be passing on details of my problems with the JO to openDemocracy. And once I have finished this application for an internal review, I will be challenging the Judicial Office’s evasion, and suppression of email evidence in their response to my recent SAR.

I will be submitting another SAR asking for email correspondence between the JO and the Cabinet Office, and their Clearing House unit. The same day I received your response, I received another FOI Response from another government department which landed in my inbox at exactly the same time as the JO’s. I should alert you to the fact that I have a ‘source’, a whistle-blower who works in a government department and has access to highly sensitive material/emails etc. They are keeping me informed about SARs and other information that is being withheld from me. Their help has been invaluable.

The JO is a shadowy, mysterious department who want to make it extremely difficult to complain about them. They are the only government department I’ve found that does not publish a ‘Complaints Policy and Procedures'. Even the GLD does this… and, of course, the MoJ. During the lockdown, they told an 81 year-old man with a pacemaker, who was clinically vulnerable, that if he wanted to complain about them, he had to send a letter to the address of the Chief Executive. This meant that during lockdown, he would have to purchase notepaper and go to a post office, buy stamps and post his letter. That man, of course, was me.

That sums up the JO’s attitude towards transparency, and accountability.

Finally, what does it say about the JO’s attitude towards factual accuracy when their FOI Response begins: ‘Thank you for your request date 17 March 2022, in which you asked for the following information from the Ministry of Justice..’. I didn’t. In your opening lines, there’s factual inaccuracy. I requested the information from ‘the Judicial Office’. Don’t you proofread letters? Thereafter, you seem to alternate between responding as the MoJ, or as the JO.

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,

Dudley Jones