This is an HTML version of an attachment to the Freedom of Information request 'Loss Of DWP Client Files'.

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