Request
I would like to know if you hold the following documents:
Correspondence (analogue or digital) pertaining to the Windrush landing cards, between the National Archives and The UKVI Landing Card Unit and/or the Home Office and/or any other government department or minister. Or between the the Advisory Council on Public Records and the National Archives.
Correspondence regarding any aspect of the Windrush landing cards that were destroyed by the UKVI Landing Card Unit.
Outcome
Information withheld.
Response
From our preliminary assessment, it is clear that we will not be able to answer your request because to do so would exceed the cost limit provision under section 12 of the Act. Section 12(1) removes the obligation for a public authority to comply with a request for information if the cost of complying with the request would exceed an appropriate limit. For further information about why this exemption has been applied, please see the explanatory Annex below.
Advice and Assistance in relation to this request
You may want to consider refining your request by narrowing its scope and being more specific about the particular information you wish to obtain. For example:
• By including any specific dates or period of time relevant to the information required. This might include, for example, specifying correspondence from a particular month.
• By refining the scope of your initial request. As you requested correspondence between multiple correspondents (the UKVI Landing Card Unit, Home Office, any other government departments and ministers and the Advisory Council on Public Records and the National Archives) this could expand the amount of information significantly and exceed the cost limit laid out by Section 12 of the FOI Act. You may wish to consider identifying one specific government department or correspondent in any further FOI request.
The National Archives has received several Freedom of Information requests for similar information in the past, and we recommend searching our web archive in order to identify requests that have previously been answered. Please see the links below for similar requests answered previously, some of which include details of how to access related information within open records at The National Archives :
FOI Request: Information related to Home Office landing cards (June 2018)
FOI Request: Windrush Generation landing cards (May 2018)
FOI Request: Windrush Generation landing cards (May 2018)
FOI Request: Information related to Windrush Generation landing cards (May 2018)
You may find guidance produced by the ICO useful for this process: ‘How should I word my request to get the best result?’
This provides some tips for making effective FOI requests, so that you can find the core information which is important to you.
To be clear, you are not obliged to inform us of the purpose of your request, but the more descriptive information you provide, the more we can help you identify if we hold the information you are looking for within the cost limit.
We are unable to guarantee that any refined requests would fall within the cost limit.
Explanatory Annex
Exemptions applied
Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit, which for central government departments like The National Archives, is set at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending just over three working days determining whether the department holds the information, as well as locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
We estimate that it will take us in excess of this to identify the appropriate information, and locate, retrieve and extract it in response to your request because it is so wide ranging. This is because, in the normal course of business The National Archives corresponds regularly with, and holds records on, other government departments including the Home Office and the other correspondents you have mentioned.
To retrieve the information you have specified in your request would require multiple business areas searching through thousands of pieces of correspondence to identify and determine information relevant to the scope of your request, which unfortunately is not possible within the cost limit. Therefore we will not be processing your request any further. Further guidance can be found at: