Dear Government Legal Department,
1. Over the last 3 years what has been the cost to the Cabinet Office/Clearing House unit of the GLD fees for advice/representation in the unsuccessful defence of the Cabinet Office's obstruction, evasion and prevarication related to FOI Requests? The Cabinet Office was found guilty by Judge Hughes in June 2021. Have there been further GLD fees for the Cabinet Office since the judge's ruling - if so what is the cost so far?
2. What has been the cost to the Judicial Office since December 2020 for GLD senior lawyer, Chris Dyton, and the then GLD Director of Litigation, Mel Nebranjani, to act as secretarial assistants for Chamber President Mrs Justice Farbey DBE in the period December 2020 to mid 2021?
3. Did the Judicial Office ask the GLD for an estimate of the cost of of employing a senior GLD lawyer to act as the Judge's secretarial assistant - bearing in mind they already have 15 lawyers on their staff roll who would could have carried out secretarial duties without involving any additional cost the Judicial Office?
4. Did the GLD advise the Judicial Office that they could easily employ one of their own lawyers to act as Judge Farbey's messenger boy, rather than use a senior GLD lawyer and thus involve the JO in legal costs which would ultimately be borne by the tax payer?

Yours faithfully,

Dudley Jones

Dear FOI,
Please respond to the above request as required by law.
You should have replied by 21 Feb 2022.

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones

Dear FOI,
Once again, the GLD is breaking the law - it seems to be habitual. You have now breached the FOI Act by not providing the information I have requested within the prescribed time.

I presume Susanna McGibbon - not content with illegally usurping the role of the Ombudsman (Rob Behrens) - has approved your breach of the FOIA.

I will grant you a further extension of 7 working days. If by the 23 March you have not provided me with the information requested, I will refer your illegal lawbreaking to the ICO.

Yours sincerely,

Dudley Jones

Dear Government Legal Department,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Government Legal Department's handling of my FOI request 'what has been the cost of the GLD's fees to the Cabinet Office and the Judicial Office for advice/representation?'

Dear Government Legal Department Data Protection Team,

You acknowledged receipt of my FOI Request on 24 Jan 2022. I wrote to you on 23 Feb 2022, saying you should – by law – have responded to my Request by 21 Feb. I wrote to you again on the 13 March, reminding you that since there had been no response from the Government’s legal department, you were again in breach of the law. Although your Response is dated the 21 March, 2022, it actually appears to have been sent on the 25 March because that was when it was received on the WhatDoTheyKnow.com site.

When organisations have exceeded the prescribed time limit for responding to an FOI Request, they almost invariably apologise for the delay. Your Response was twice delayed and yet there was no apology from the GLD..

You refused my Request on the grounds you felt it was ‘vexatious’. It's curious it took you such a long time to come to that conclusion – with 2 delays, it took just over 2 months to respond to my FOI Request, you are obliged to respond within 20 working days..

You say that this request was ‘vexatious’ because:
1) I have attempted ‘to reopen an issue that has already been comprehensively and conclusively addressed by the public authority, or otherwise to some form of independent scrutiny; and/or where the requestor submits frequent correspondence about the same issue’. My first and main request for information here is about the cost of GLD advice/representation over three years to the Cabinet Office for the unsuccessful defence of the Cabinet Office Clearing House Unit’s ‘obstruction, evasion, and prevarication’ related to FOI Requests, and about any other advice/representation the GLD subsequently provided to the CO. I am not aware of having asked this question before. Can you please provide one example of me doing this? Has this Request already been addressed ‘comprehensively’ and/or ‘conclusively’? Certainly the fine of £500, 000 is available in the public domain – but are the GLD’s legal costs? If so., please tell me where I can find them. It’s only when they are factored in, that the true cost to the tax payer can be assessed. I hope you will agree this is a ‘public interest’ matter. I am confident the ICO would agree.
2) My other request was for the cost of legal advice to the Judicial Office. You say you have ‘responded to a number of requests from [me] pertaining to similar/the same information’. I’m not sure there isn’t a degree of subjective interpretation about what is ‘similar’ information. What I am not aware of is a number of requests relating to the same information. I have in the past been provided with a figure of £362,000 which was the overall cost of GLD legal fees to the Judicial Office over a certain period. I assume that was not simply the cost of Mr Dyton, a senior GLD lawyer, providing secretarial assistance for a Judge (the Judicial Office informed me ‘it was not unusual for the JO to help out with secretarial assistance for judges’). It seems to me that once again, there is a legitimate ‘public interest’ issue here. At a time when we are facing an economic crisis, with soaring inflation and energy increases of £700 for the average household, it is incumbent on public authorities like the GLD to ensure tax payers’ money is not wasted. Does the GLD not have a duty of care towards the public to avoid unnecessary expenditure? Why didn’t Mr Dyton advise the Judicial Office that it had 14 full-time lawyers on its staff roll, each of whom could do the job of providing a judge with secretarial assistance as well as him – without any additional cost to the tax payer? This is not an academic point: the pandemic (and now sanctions against Putin) has made an economic depression almost inevitable. I hope you will agree that it behoves government departments to take every possible step to avoid unnecessary expenditure.

I’m 81 and it’s possible the GLD have told me in the past that they have no means of estimating the cost of Mr Dyton’s secretarial assistance. If that is so, I apologise, but if that is the case, we are talking about ONE instance, not a ‘number’ of instances. Your ‘vexatious’ charge is full of generalised accusations, there are no examples provided, nor any evidence. You talk about ‘situations’ where ‘an issue’ has been ‘subjected to some form of independent scrutiny and/or where the requestor submits frequent correspondence about the same issue. ‘ But you don’t name a single one, there’s not a single example.

And what does ‘the requestor submits frequent correspondence about the same issue’ mean? Are you talking about email correspondence in the context of a dispute or are you talking about FOI Requests? If the latter, I defy you to produce examples of frequent FOI Requests about the same issue.

What’s even more extraordinary and puzzling are your references to ‘copious’ requests to the ICO. I haven’t made any! I defy you to produce a single request to the ICO. And what on earth does ‘pursuant to these requests [what requests?] in varying degrees’ mean? It’s lawyerly language, but vague, unsubstantiated and imprecise.

Since my main Request is for the cost of GLD advice/representation of the Cabinet Office (in the case against them brought by OpenDemocracy campaign group and their lawyers, Leigh Day) if you were thinking the ICO would be sympathetic towards your position, I feel you would be sadly disappointed. Judge Hughes and David Davies MP were not the only ones to condemn the Cabinet Office for their abuse of the FOI Act, the ICO joined in that condemnation.

I note that you haven’t made me aware of my right to request an internal review. Or does an FOI Requestor not have that right to request an internal review? If I do, I would like to exercise that right.

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

Yours faithfully,

Dudley Jones