Advice provided to Home Office regarding pushbacks
Dear Home Office,
Please consider the following as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. On 9 September 2021, the Home Office announced to the press that Border Force officers were receiving training to employ 'turn-around' tactics to return people seeking to reach the UK by boat in order to claim asylum to France.
A Home Office spokesperson quoted in several press articles stated that the Home Secretary had "become the first...to establish a legal basis for the sea tactics, working with acting attorney general Michael Ellis and expert QCs."
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please disclose any policy documents produced by the Home Office relating to the sea tactics as described above, including any and all legal advice cited.
Yours faithfully,
Mary Atkinson
Thank you for contacting the Home Office Freedom of Information Requests
Mailbox.
This is to acknowledge receipt of your email.
Dear Ms Atkinson,
Thank you for contacting the Home Office with your request.
This has been assigned to a caseworker (case ref 65968). We will aim to send you a full response by 07/10/2021 which is twenty working days from the date we received your request.
If you have any questions then please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
P. Zebedee
FOI Requests
Home Office
Dear Mary Atkinson
Thank you for your e-mail of 9 September, in which you ask for information on Home Office BF policy relating to sea tactics. Your request is being handled as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
We are considering your request. Although the FOIA carries a presumption in favour of disclosure, it provides exemptions which may be used to withhold information in specified circumstances. Some of these exemptions, referred to as 'qualified' exemptions, are subject to a public interest test. This test is used to balance the public interest in disclosure against the public interest in favour of withholding the information. The FOIA allows us to exceed the 20 working day response target where we need to consider the public interest test fully.
The information which you have requested is being considered under the exemption[in section 31 of the FOIA, which relates to law enforcement. This is a qualified exemption and to consider the public interest test fully we need to extend the 20 working day response period. We now aim to let you have a full response by 2 November.
Yours sincerely
H Reid
Border Force - Information Rights Team
Dear Mary Atkinson,
Please find attached a response to your recent Freedom of Information Act
enquiry.
Kind regards
Home Office
Immigration Enforcement Secretariat.
Freedom of Information & Parliamentary Questions Team
Sandford House
West Midlands
Dear Home Office,
Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.
I am writing to request an internal review of Home Office's handling of my FOI request 'Advice provided to Home Office regarding pushbacks'. Please conduct an internal review into the decision to exempt the entirety of the legal advice provided to the Home Office in this matter under Sections 31 and 42 of the FOIA.
As the PIT finds, there is public interest in transparent operation of government, including the legal advice on which it bases its policy decisions. It appears that advice privilege, rather than litigation privilege, is being relied on here. ICO guidance notes that "advice...on an operational or strategic matter is unlikely to be privileged." I am therefore unsatisfied that the privilege is engaged, and this has not been sufficiently established in the refusal letter.
Further, it has not been established that there is a causal link between the disclosure of the information being requested and the claimed prejudice. I am therefore requesting an internal review of this decision.
A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ad...
Yours faithfully,
Mary Atkinson
Thank you for contacting the Home Office Freedom of Information Requests
Mailbox.
This is to acknowledge receipt of your email.
Dear Mary Atkinson;
Please provide the FOI reference number to which your request was initially allocated so that we can allocate it and process your request for an internal review.
M Hucherko
Home Office
Dear FOI Requests,
Thank you for your swift response. The original reference number allocated to this request was 65968.
Yours sincerely,
Mary Atkinson
Thank you for contacting the Home Office Freedom of Information Requests
Mailbox.
This is to acknowledge receipt of your email.
Dear Ms Atkinson,
Thank you for contacting the Home Office with your request for an Internal Review of Foi case ref 65968.
This has been assigned to a caseworker who will aim to send you a full response by 30/12/2021 which is twenty working days from the date we received your request.
If you have any questions then please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
P. Zebedee
FOI Requests
Home Office
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