Dear Cabinet Office,

Please can you confirm that your team handles FOI requests on behalf of the Office of the Prime Minister?

On the basis that this is so, I would like to request the disclosure of information that may be held by either the Office of the Prime Minister or the Cabinet Office or both.

Please would you, with reference to the UK's FOI legislation, disclose any email or letter communication between any of the Prime Minister, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Cabinet Office, and any of Robert Jenrick Secretary of State or his department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, in relation to the Richard Desmond property development where it was recently reported that Robert Jenrick admits he 'acted unlawfully' in granting approval just before a new tax scheme came into force.

Please also advise whether you hold information on telephone calls between the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State in question, specifically time, date and duration. If you do, please disclose that information from the present (latest information at time of your final response) as far back as 24th July 2019 when, I believe, both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State took their respective offices.

Yours faithfully,

Rob Davidson

Dear FOI Team Mailbox,

Please can you provide an updated timeline on my FOI request?

Yours sincerely,

Robert Davidson

Dear FOI Team Mailbox,

Thank you for your response.

Please confirm that you do conduct FOI responses on behalf of the Office of the Prime Minister and whether there are records made of telephone communications as per my original request.

Regarding the request for email or letter communications that you have refused: please would you respond to the request as though I had specified that I was interested in communications originating at any of the departments or persons mentioned rather than ones that happened to be conveyed by those persons. Please also consider only electronic communications that are searchable.

I believe that should remove the problems that your response indicated. Please advise if not.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Davidson

Dear FOI Team Mailbox,

Thank you for your response to my FOI request. In your response you state that you have made the interpretation that I am requesting documents from before the secretary of state made his decision regarding the Desmond development.

This is an inaccurate interpretation. Please reconsider the request from the present date going back to when the secretary of state made his decision.

Also, please confirm or correct me on whether you hold logs of phone calls as per my past requests and re-requests.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Davidson

Dear Cabinet Office,

Please can you provide an updated timescale on this request?

Yours faithfully,

Robert Davidson

Dear Cabinet Office,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Cabinet Office's handling of my FOI request 'Communications regarding Jenrick/ Desmond housing approval'.

The purpose of my request is to discover what records the Office of the Prime Minister, Downing Street or Cabinet Office may have in relation to communications between the PM or those working at his request and the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, SINCE it emerged that he had acted illegally regarding a housing application from the developer Richard Desmond.

When I initially made my request, the Cabinet Office responded to say it was too broad.
I responded to narrow the request - specifying that they should search electronic communications only and that it should cover only communications originating from the offices I specified rather than any letters or communications being forwarded through those offices.
The Cabinet Office then responded to say that there would be no such communications BEFORE Jenrick had made his intervention in the case because these decisions were entirely departmental.
I replied to request that they consider the period SINCE the decision had been made.
In the final and most recent response from the Cabinet Office FOI team, I have simply had the first two responses repeated - both that it is not possible to search written, hard-copy communications that may have been forwarded by the offices mentioned, and that these offices would not have contacted the Secretary of State prior to his decision.

A new term does creep into the most recent response, your office would not hold any information regarding the "live planning application" from Desmond.

If, this means that Desmond's planning application is still 'live' and therefore the PM would not, because the application process has 'live' status, have communicated with his own appointed Secretary about an illegal act in which the Secretary had admitted participating, then please state that clearly. Please confirm that this would still be the case even where the Secretary has handed over handling of the case to another minister, as widely reported in this case.

If this is not correct, and it seems quite incredible, then I wish an internal review to unravel the apparent dismissal of my updated request by the Cabinet Office.

I do understand that my first enquiry may have been too broad or used inaccurate language and that subsequent refinements were required. I do not understand why the most recent response appears to ignore any of my updates and refinements and therefore returns me to step one as though I had not been engaging with the team for months now - barring the possibility that the use of "live application," as described above, is meant to indicate that all aspects of my request and updates are null and void.

Further, in each and every request I have asked whether the Cabinet Office hold or have access to records of phone calls between the offices I have specified. I have not asked for the release of that information but simply to be told if it exists. This appears to have been ignored in each and every response from the team and I would still like an answer to that question.

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

Yours faithfully,

Robert Davidson