Journalistic Access to Prisons

The request was partially successful.

Dear Ministry of Justice,

I understand that Journalistic access to prisons requires the approval of the Secretary of State (currently Chris Grayling).

Please provide the following information:

Q1. Under what legislation (primary & secondary) is the Secretary of State granted powers to grant or deny journalistic access to prisons? If the Secretary of State is not granted these powers by primary or secondary legislation please confirm this.

Q2. Please provide copies of the policy / guidance documents that specifies the basis upon which the Secretary of State exercises his discretion to grant or deny journalistic access to prisons. If the MoJ does not hold this information then please confirm this.

Q3. What type of information (I don't what the actual information) does the Ministry of Justice gather regarding regarding requests for journalistic access to prisons.

Yours faithfully,

John Slater

Dear Ministry of Justice,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Ministry of Justice's handling of my FOI request 'Journalistic Access to Prisons'.

The MoJ has not complied with its statutory Duty to respond to requests for information under the FOIA within 20 working days.

This is the only IRR I will submit in respect of this request and should the MoJ fail to comply with the ICO guidance requiring it to provide a definitive response within 40 days (this includes time to deal with an IRR) I will complain to the Information Commissioner.

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

Yours faithfully,

John Slater

Doug Paulley left an annotation ()

WhatDoTheyKnow email logs show that these messages were successfully accepted with server response "250 OK" at 2015-02-06 11:47:45 and 2015-03-07 13:55:51 respectively.

--
Doug, volunteer WhatDoTheyKnow.com

John Slater left an annotation ()

A complaint has been made to the Information Commissioner

John Slater left an annotation ()

ICO has written to the MoJ giving it 10 days to respond to my request.

Doug Paulley left an annotation ()

There have been a proportion of requests to the MoJ that have gone unacknowledged and unanswered recently. (Though by no means all.) See https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/u... for example. In all the cases I have checked, their email server received the request and any followups and responded with a "250 OK".

Yesterday, I emailed the MoJ to ask if they are having some problems where a proportion of their email traffic is blocked. I have directed them to our help page on spam filters etc.

Hopefully this, and your action through the ICO, may make them deal with any technical issues they are experiencing.

Thank you

--
Doug - Volunteer, WhatDoTheyKnow.com

John Slater left an annotation ()

Doug,

Thank you for helping the MoJ and am I grateful for your help with this request (and the help I get from all the volunteers on WDTK).

Kind Regards
John

John Slater left an annotation ()

The MoJ has failed to comply with the ICO 10 day deadline. I have therefore referred the matter back to the ICO.

Data Access & Compliance Unit, Ministry of Justice

1 Attachment

Dear Mr Slater,
 
With apologies for the delay in response, please find attached the
Department's response to your FOI request.
 
Regards,
 
Data Access and Compliance Unit  | Communication and Information
Directorate | Ministry of Justice 10.34, 102 Petty France, London, SW1H
9AJ

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