Duke of York records 2020-2024

Advice and assistance

It has been determined that the request in its current form remains too broad both in terms of the information being requested and the timeframe covered. The request has therefore been refused under section 12 of the FOI Act.

Under section 16 of the FOI Act a public authority is required to provide advice and assistance to help the requester in the revision of a request refused under section 12, if it is possible to provide such advice.

Firstly, you may wish to consider reducing the timeframe of your request. Although we note that your request has been reduced from 24 years to 4 years, it is still considered excessively broad due to the range of information being requested. Locating, retrieving and extracting relevant information will still exceed the cost limit.

Any revision of the timeframe will of course be dependant on how other aspects of your request are refined.

As with your previous request, a starting point for why your request has been refused is because information relating to FOI requests received by TNA are covered by the request. It is not possible to ascertain from data in case-management software which requests are relevant to the criteria specified, without checking the audit history of each request manually. Even the identification of case references within TNA’s electronic storage areas using a search term such as ‘Duke of York’ would require a substantial amount of work to identify relevant records within case folders, and to eliminate false positives and exclude duplicated information.

Even if FOI requests are your sole interest, you would likely need to both specify records you are interested in, as well as shorten the timeframe to cover FOI requests received in a very limited period. Please note that the FOI Centre processes several thousand requests each year (excluding FOI requests for access to service personnel records).

Alternatively, assuming that FOI requests are not of interest, their exclusion from a refined request would still likely mean that further refinement to the request would be needed in order for TNA to be able to comply. This is because you have specified a broad range of processes that TNA undertakes (i.e., the handling, access, retention, reclosure or takedown of records).

Furthermore, on top of this, you have specified that the request relates to both internally-generated correspondence, as well as external correspondence with a number of government departments and third-party bodies.

We recommend that any refined request be as specific and limited as possible in terms of identifying information you are requesting, rather than taking a very broad approach which might, unfortunately, not be resolvable within the cost limit defined within the FOI Act.

We are unable to guarantee if a refined request will be resolvable within the cost limit. This will depend on the nature of any refined request.

Please note that a request that is not considered exempt under the cost limit may be refused by a public authority under section 14 of the FOI Act on the grounds that compliance would constitute a manifestly unreasonable or oppressive burden on available resource. This may be the case where a large heterogeneous mass of correspondence and other material is identified (for example, within the case folders of a large number of FOI requests) within a request that is broad but resolvable within the cost limit, but where the complexity of conducting a sensitivity review is made manifestly burdensome due to the requirement for substantial redactions under a number of FOI exemptions. This is why we recommend that any refined request is kept as specific and narrow as possible.

The ICO refers to broad requests of this character as ‘fishing expeditions’, and whilst such a request may not necessarily be vexatious per se (ie. they may have a legitimate purpose, which TNA recognises in this case), they may nonetheless constitute a manifestly unreasonable and oppressive burden on TNA’s available resources.

If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request or the decision which has been reached, you have the right to ask for an internal review. Internal review requests must be submitted within two months of the date of this response and should be addressed to:

Quality Manager

The National Archives

Kew

Richmond

Surrey

TW9 4DU

complaints@nationalarchives.gov.uk

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 an 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 time to identify the appropriate information, and locate, retrieve and extract it as the scope of your request is too wide-ranging. Therefore, your request will not be processed further.

You may wish to consider refining your request. However, please note that we are unable to guarantee that any refined requests would fall within the cost limit.

Further guidance on the application of this exemption can be found here.