Mr
White
12
June
2009
WhatDoTheyKnow.com
Dear Mr White
Freedom of Information request – VTR 923
Thank you for your Freedom of Information (FoI) request of 18 May which
follows up the one you made earlier - our reference for that earlier request is
VTR 790.
Your latest e-mail questions the substance of the Department’s response to
your earlier request. You now seek “a correct and full response”. You
indicate, however, that you do not want your challenge to our initial reply to be
treated as an “internal review”.
Where we receive a reply to an earlier FoI response making clear that the
requester does not accept the previous decision on their request it is
customary to treat that complaint as a request for an internal review.
We have therefore re-considered your original request anew taking into
account the comments made in your complaint of 18 May.
For clarity your initial request was as follows:--
Please provide the following information, broken down by Business year for the last 10 business years
and Benefit claimed.
1. How many Manually held claimant files are lost or believed lost each year?
2. How many files that are believed lost or missing are recovered?
3 What is the mean time for recovery of a missing or presumed lost file from DWP storage facilities?
Background
The Department for Work and Pensions is a very large Government
Department with a significant number of delivery businesses spread
geographically across Great Britain. To give you a sense of the scale of the
Department’s operations Jobcentre Plus staff conduct over 45,000 adviser
interviews each working day; administer 16,000 new benefit claims; receive
over 10,000 job vacancies and oversee the Jobcentre Plus website which
receives around 1 million job searches daily.
In addition the Pension Disability and Carers Service process 3,000 State
Pension applications each working day and 3,000 new or renewal claims to
Disability Benefits. The Department also answers over 300,000 telephone
calls to its help-lines each working day.
I provide this background to illustrate the nature and size of the Department’s
business and that inevitably there are a large number of claimant files created
daily and even larger numbers in remote storage.
Your request seeks detailed information relating to lost/found claimant files, by
benefit claimed, spanning a decade. Given the explanation above you will
understand that this request is not only very broad in its scope but also covers
information going back over a very long period of time.
You are right to point out that the Department’s security guidance requires
any loss of a single client file to be reported to a security adviser. However,
there are security advisers located in each benefit office and nearly all so
called lost files are in fact temporarily mislaid within the Department. To
provide the answers to your questions would require a large number of
security advisers across the country to go through locally held records, some
of which are likely to have been destroyed and others held in remote storage.
To add to this, in recent years the transmission and storage of such files has
been the responsibility of contracted courier and storage providers.
I confirm that the information you seek has not been collected centrally by the
Department in the past. Given this background, and the 10 year time frame in
which you are interested, I am satisfied that this information could only be
identified and retrieved from the relevant benefit offices and contractors at a
very significant cost.
We estimate that this cost would exceed by a very substantial margin the FoI
limit for compiling the information needed to deal with your request. As you
know, this cost limit is set in regulations at £600. By virtue of section 12 of the
FoI Act the Department is therefore not required to comply with your request
and we will not process it any further.
You suggest, however, that the information you seek should be centrally held
and obtainable from the Departmental Audit Committee. That Committee does
indeed receive information relating to significant incidents involving client
records which, since last year, have been published in the Department’s
Resource Accounts. You can, for example, access, pages 12 and 13 of the
2007/08 Resource Accounts which can be found at
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/resourcecentre/corporate-
publications.asp#resourceaccounts
The Audit Committee reports do not, however, cover the level of detail that
you have requested and do not therefore contain the information in question.
If you are not content with the outcome of this internal review you have the
right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner to look into the way
your request has been handled. The Commissioner can be contacted at:
Email: xxxx@xxx.xxx.xxx.xx
DWP FoI Team