Dear University of Cambridge,

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am requesting that you describe the information held by the University pertaining to the protest against David Willetts MP on 22 November 2011 at Lady Mitchell Hall. Such information would include any information relating to subsequent public expressions of support for the event within the University.

I do not require a detailed description of each item; but would ask that you annotate your list indicating which items name individual protesters, although please note that I am not requesting that such annotations include any personal data which you are not allowed to disclose under the Act.

Please send all communication to this email address.

Yours sincerely,
Dr [Name Removed]

Dear Dr Knapton,

thank you for your advice. Please find below a clarified request.

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am requesting that you describe information held by the University concerning the protest against David Willetts MP on 22 November 2011 at Lady Mitchell Hall. This request also covers information relating to subsequent expressions of support for the protest and the protesters within the University, made by members of the University through websites, open letters and emails, or in news media.

In your recent letter, you advised me 'to limit [my] request to information held by a limited number of specified departments or divisions of the University and/or University employees, or, if [I] believe the information requested [...] to be held in particular locations, to identify those locations'.

Pursuant to this advice, I am limiting this application to certain jurisdictions within the University. In particular, please describe the information held on the subject of the aforementioned protest and on subjects directly pertaining to that protest, in electronic or paper form, by the following officers of the University:

1) the Senior Proctor

2) the Junior Proctor

3) the University Advocate

4) the Registrary

5) the organiser of the CRASSH event which Mr Willetts was attending when the protest occurred

This request covers all relevant information stored in their respective offices, on any computers they use for official University business, by any secretaries or assistants, and on their University email accounts.

I do not require a detailed description of each item. However, I would ask that you annotate your list indicating which items identify individual protesters - but please note that I am not requesting that such annotations include any personal data which you are not allowed to disclose under the Act.

Yours sincerely,
[Name Removed]

Dear Dr Knapton,

Thank you for dealing with this request in a conscientious manner.

The University's response includes the following preamble: 'I provide below a list of materials fitting your description (to the best of the University’s understanding of that description)'. For the sake of accuracy, could you please describe 'the University's understanding of that description'? For obvious reasons, I would like to make sure that my request was interpreted in the way I intended. Thank you.

Yours sincerely,
[Name Removed]

Dear FOI Team,

thank you for your response.

I confess I am a little puzzled, as I thought that public authorities are meant to clarify what information is sought in a particular request if they are in any doubt about what information is actually being requested: this is one of the reasons I queried the phrase "to the best of the University's understanding of that description", which formed part of your response to my request.

Since you chose to treat my request of 8 March 2012 as a new request, you should not have relied upon your request for clarification in relation to my request of 15 February 2012 (FOI-2012-48), but instead acted in accordance with the code of practice issued under Section 45 of the Act in 2004 (specifically paragraphs 8-11 in Part II of this code of practice). That is, I would have expected you to have sought clarification from me as to what I meant in my request of 8 March 2012 if, as seems probable from your use of the aforementioned phrase, there was any doubt about exactly what information I sought.

In addition, there are aspects of your latest reply which I find concerning: I can no longer be sure that you have indeed provided the information I requested given uncertainties arising from this reply. I would therefore appreciate some further clarification. You write:

“By way of clarification, your request was interpreted broadly to include information held by the relevant Officers which related to any matter connected with the protest on 22 November 2011, including, for example, materials relating to the consequent proceedings before the Court of Discipline.”

If 'materials relating to the consequent proceedings before the Court of Discipline' were indeed described in the list of items provided, I would have expected further documents - such as would accompany a case of that kind, including records arising from the standard processes of such a court, and its findings - to have been listed. However, they were not. I am confused therefore as to why you would state that you had listed all materials 'relating to the consequent proceedings' when that seems not to be the case. Could you please clarify what you mean by 'relating'?

Furthermore, I respectfully suggest that it would have been unreasonable to interpret my request so broadly as to suppose it applied to all the documentation produced during such proceedings. Indeed, the University’s response to the request suggests that the request was indeed interpreted less broadly than that. My inquiry related to the events and subsequent documentation of a protest in 2011; not to information produced in the course of the prosecution of a student of the University in 2012.

Although I am sure that the University will be no less helpful in relation to my current outstanding requests, I am slightly concerned, given how this request (FOI-2012-64) was interpreted according to your clarifying letter, that it is possible it might be considered appropriate for it to be aggregated with the pending requests FOI-2012-85 and FOI-2012-92 under the terms of Section 12 (4) of the Act. I do not think this would be appropriate given the substantially different information requested by these three separate requests. Further clarification of your interpretation of this request (FOI-2012-64) is therefore of some importance.

To summarize: the clarification you have offered seems on the face of it to be at variance with how you responded to the request. Consequently, I ask that you offer further, fuller clarification.

Yours sincerely,

[Name Removed]