Ministry of Justice provides information in less than 14% of all closed FOI requests on ALS/Capita
Ministry of Justice
102 Petty France
London
SW1H 9AJ
United Kingdom
www.justice.gov.uk
6th July 2012
Our Reference: FOI 76730
Freedom of Information Request
Dear Mr McCafferty
Thank you for your email of the 12th of June, in which you asked for the following information from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ):
Please confirm how many FOI requests the Ministry of Justice and the HMCTS have received in relation to the Framework Agreement with Applied Language Solutions since 1st January 2012 and how many such requests were declined, i.e. no specific data was released by the MoJ, due to the cost limit or for any other reason.
Your request has been handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
I can confirm that the department holds information that you have asked for, and I am pleased to provide this to you.
To provide this information to you, we conducted a search of our internal case management system for requests received since the first of January 2012 that were assigned to the interpreters contract team. However, please note that this is a large-scale case management system and, as with any such system, it is subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.
I can confirm that since the 1st of January 2012 the Ministry of Justice has received 82 FOI requests that have been logged to the interpreters’ team.
Of those requests:
- 7 remain open cases
- 10 requests had the information requested disclosed in full
- 27 requests were refused under the cost limit (section 12)*
- 15 requests were refused in full under other FOIA exemptions
- 14 requests were partially refused under other FOIA exemptions
- 9 requests were unclear, so we sought clarification from the requester.
*It may help if I explain that even if we refuse information under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act we do often release information on a discretionary basis, outside of FOIA. For example, where a request is refused because it exceeds the cost limit (section 12 of the FOIA) but we have some information that is readily available, we may disclose that information as part of our advice and assistance. The information above does not capture discretionary disclosure in these 82 responses, as we do not capture this type of disclosure on our case management system.
You may also wish to know that we routinely publish our FOI statistics on performance and you can view those figures at:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/statistics/foi/implementation
You can also find more information by reading the full text of the Act (available at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/contents) and further guidance http://www.justice.gov.uk/guidance/freedom-of-information.htm.
You have the right to appeal our decision if you think it is incorrect. Details can be found in the ‘How to Appeal’ section attached at the end of this letter.
Disclosure Log
You can also view information that the Ministry of Justice has disclosed in response to previous Freedom of Information requests. Responses are anonymised and published on our on-line disclosure log which can be found on the MoJ website:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/information-access-rights/foi-requests/latest-moj-disclosure-log
The published information is categorised by subject area and in alphabetical order.
Yours sincerely
Data Access and Compliance Unit.
