Payments made by the Home Office/Metropolitan Police to Portugal in respect of Operation Grange

Waiting for an internal review by Home Office of their handling of this request.

Anthony Bennett

Dear Home Office,

The following Freedom of Information Act requests are made to both the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police as it is hard to know where responsibility and accountability for this matter lies.

I ask these questions about the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Grange which, according to the remit set for it by former Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell, is ‘to investigate the abduction of Madeleine McCann as if the abduction had occurred in the U.K.’

In 2013 and 2014 there were many references in the British press to expenditure by the Portuguese Police having to be met by the British government.

These expenses are known to include:
1. The cost of hiring an Alouette Mark III top-of-the-range Portuguese military helicopter
2. The provision of extensive physical support, assistance, supervision and other assistance in connection with two searches of patches of waste ground in Praia da Luz in 2014, and
3. Extensive assistance by way of Portuguese police conducting a series of ‘rogatory interviews’ of a significant number of alleged suspects
4. Translation services in connection with (a) the 2014 search of Praia da Luz (b) the rogatory interviews of suspects and (c) any other occasons.

Please provide the following information:
A. The dates that the Portuguese Police, Ministry of Justice or any other agency of the Portuguese government requested financial assistance or otherwise submitted any invoice or other demand for payment
B. In each case, how much was demanded?
C. List all payments made in connection with Operation Grange to the Portuguese authorities.

Yours faithfully,

Anthony Bennett

FOI Requests, Home Office

Dear Mr. Bennett,

Thank you for contacting the Home Office with your request.

This has been assigned to a caseworker (case ref 40443). We will aim to send you a full response by 18/08/2016 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,

N McKenzie
FOI Requests
Home Office

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FOI Responses, Home Office

1 Attachment

Please find attached our response to your Freedom of Information request.

 

 

Home Office

2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF

[1]www.gov.uk/home-office

 

 

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References

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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 'Payments made by the Home Office/Metropolitan Police to Portugal in respect of Operation Grange'.

PLEASE NOTE THOSE PARTS OF THIS REQUEST WHICH ARE FOR ANSWER BY THE HOME OFFICE AND RESPOND ACCORDINGLY. THANK YOU

To the Senior Metropolitan Police Officer in the FOI Act section reviewing the case, attention Michela Holmes
Freedom of Information Request Reference Nos : 2016070000798 and 2016070000799
I have elected to exercise my right to have the decision review of Michela Holmes, rather than take this matter direct to the Information Commissioner, in the hope that the issues raised below can be fully dealt with.
I must first raise matters concerning the following statement by you in answer to request 2016070000799: “I note that you have now made 15 requests under the Act in relation to Operation Grange. The MPS has responded to each request, however the MPS
has committed considerable time in responding to each of your requests which have been overlapping in content. Any future requests to the MPS on a similar subject are likely to fall within the provisions of Section 14 of the Act (repetitious or vexatious requests)”.
I do not recollect having made 15 requests, but as you clearly have a note of all the dates, please supply the dates and reference numbers of each request. You have made a sweeping statement that “each of your requests have been overlapping in content”. I firmly reject that claim. If you suggest that any one claim clearly overlaps with another, please provide all examples of what you claim are overlapping examples. It is necessary that you should do this because you then go on to claim that “any” (i.e. all) requests made in future are likely to be deemed ‘repetitious or vexatious’. If you have made such a ruling, with respect you must justify it by providing all specific examples of where you say I have made overlapping requests.
I would also with respect remind you that only a request can be deemed vexatious, not the requester. Please confirm that you acknowledge this very important point.
Before going on to address specific points in your replies, on which I now appeal to your senior Met Police FOI Act officer, I invite the Head of your FOIAct section to consider the following points in relation to Operation Grange:
1 When the remit of Operation Grange was eventually released - incidentally in response to one of my FOI Act requests, which was clearly not unreasonable - the remit included these words: “The ‘investigative review’ will be conducted with transparency, openness and thoroughness…” The Met Police FOI Act Section, when answering any FOI Act question, from myself or anyone else, about Operation Grange, should always have that part of their remit firmly in mind
2 The Madeleine McCann case is one of exceptional public interest and remains so after 9 years. It is also highly controversial. The Met/Home Office admit to having spent around £13 million on it so far, over more than 5 years, without apparent result. It is inevitable that such a controversial investigation will elicit FOI Act questions from journalists and the public.
Dealing with my two specific FOI Act questions, they are about the expenditure of Operation Grange (including and demands for payment by the Portuguese authorities, about who authorises and pays for its costs, and when, and by whom, decisions to allocate extra funding are made.
These should not be difficult questions to answer. Operation Grange has an Investigation Officer, initially DCI Andy Redwood, and later DCI Nicola Wall. It has a Senior Investigating Officer, initially Hamish Campbell. We know from many public, on-the-record statements that other, more senior staff, up to Assistant Commissioner level, are involved in this case on a regular basis. It is undoubtedly a case where Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met Police Commissioner, and indeed senior Home Office civil servants and Home Office Ministers themselves will be very familiar with this case and many of these would be very simply able to answer both sets of questions I have posed. Neither of my requests, as you acknowledge by implication, raises any issue of the information sought being exempt from disclosure under the Act.

To make my point still clearer, on Sunday 18 September the Sunday Express published an article, clearly based on information from Met Police sources, about a six-month extension for Operation Grange, and the allocation of £100,000 further expenditure. The article said:
“Financing for the four-strong team of officers working on Operation Grange was due to end in October. But a fresh request, believed to be for a sum of around £100,000, was submitted to the Home Office as the deadline approached and has now been signed off. A Whitehall source had indicated funding would be approved if “compelling evidence that justifies the use of additional taxpayers’ money” was provided by the team. A spokesman for the Home Office said on Friday: “We have provided the Metropolitan Police with the funding required for Operation Grange to continue until at least the end of this financial year. “The resources required will be reviewed again at this point.”
What is plain from this report is that on a certain date, a certain individual from Operation Grange or the Met Police made a request for more funding, and again, on a certain date, a certain individual at the Home Office approved it. It is quite clear that information must be held by both the Met Police and the Home Office about this transaction. It would be the easiest thing in the world for an FOI Act officer to contact a senior Meet Police officer and ask him/her to provide this information, which must be logged.
This process of Met Police request, followed by Home Office approval, has taken place on certain dates in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and twice in 2016. I simply seek to know, in each case (I will slightly amplify my request on this occasion):
A Who asked for the extra funding (name or rank of officer?
B On what date did the Met make the request?
C How much was asked for?
D Who at the Home Office communicated the decision to the Met Police?
E Who ;’signed off’ the request (name or rank of Minister or civil servant)?, and
F What amount of extra funding was granted?
You have already answered question (F). The other questions are capable of a swift answer from those in a positon to know the answers and since some of the details of these transactions are already known, it can hardly be a problem to provide some further information about them.
Providing the amounts of money allocated each year was not my question. I was specifically interested in the dates and details of the process of request and reply.
Dealing with Request No. 2016070000799, you replied: “To locate the information relevant to your request searches were conducted at Operation Grange. The searches failed to locate any information relevant to your request, therefore, the information you have requested is not held by the MPS”

I cannot accept that as a reasonable or honest answer to my question. There has been extensive coverage in the media about the Portuguese authorities billing the MET Police or the Home Office for their costs. Those leading Operation Grange and those from whom they seek funding at the Home Office will know precisely what amounts (if any) have been requested by Portugal and what has been paid. Therefore, I suggest the range of possible valid responses by yourselves to my FOI requests would be one of these:
A £x has been requested by the Portugusee authorities and x has been paid, or
B No request has yet been made by the Portuguese authorities, or
C The information is held by the Home Office (or another government department) so you wil need to ask them.
Bearing in mind the duty of all FOI Act officers to be helpful wherever possible, to enable the public to obtain answers, and taking into consideration Operation Grange’s remit which specifically includes transparency and openness, please now answer those questions about any demands for payment from Portugal.
In relation to Request No. 2016070000798, you have answered Question 3. I now seek to vary slightly my Questions 1 and 2, as follows:
1. The precise calendar date when the original allocation of funds was made (you have told me it was £2.5 million so I don’t need you to answer the rest of the question) ?
2. For each subsequent extension of funds, please state: (a) The precise calendar date on which application was made for further funding (b) How much on each
occasion the Met Police applied for (c) the name or rank of the officer Met Police officer making the request (d) The precise calendar date on which the Home
Secretary (or Junior Minister or civil servant) approved additional funds, and (e) In each case, the name or rank of the Minister or civil servant who approved extra funding and what was granted, and for what precise future period of time.(You have already answered my questions about the amount allocated.
If it be objected that the Home Office is a third party and their consent needs to be obtained before disclosing the information, please consider that in order to extract the information I seek, the senior Met Officer responsible for Operation Grange can very easily speak to his opposite number in the Home Office and obtain the necessary information. It would be a simple matter to resolve and would put to bed this particular couple of FOI Act requests.
I am not seeking anything very complicated. Nor anything that’s meant to be a secret and can’t be disclosed or is exempt. The FOI Act is meant to assist the public in getting answers to straightforward requests for information like these two.
Sincerely
Anthony Bennett

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

Yours faithfully,

Anthony Bennett

FOI Requests, Home Office

Dear Anthony Bennett,

Thank you for contacting the Home Office with your request for an Internal Review.

This has been assigned to a caseworker (retaining case ref 40443). We will aim to send you a full response by 20/10/16 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,

A Callaghan
FOI Requests
Home Office

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