Dear Mr Dransfield
Thank you for your email of 12 February 2014 in which you have made a request for information to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Specifically in your email you asked;
“Please provide with full details of the final pension details for all senior ICO executive staff.”
We are treating your request as a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
The ICO already publishes some information on its website about the pension arrangements of its senior executive team. This information can be found in our Annual Reports and also in the Management Board’s Register of interests;
http://ico.org.uk/about_us/performance/annual_reports
http://ico.org.uk/about_us/our_organisation/management_board/registers_of_interest
As this information is reasonably accessible to you from our website this information is exempt under section 21 of the FOIA.
The information on our website represents the extent of the information we intend to publish about pension arrangements for senior ICO staff. We consider that disclosure beyond this would be unfair.
However we recognise that the scope of your request for ‘full details of the final pension details for all senior ICO executive staff’ extends beyond information which is already published and we are refusing this further element your request as vexatious under the provisions of section 14(1) of FOIA.
As you will be aware we have previously explained to you our reasons why the various requests you have submitted to the ICO are refused in reliance on section 14(1). Therefore we do not intend to repeat these in any detail here. However you should understand that our reasons for refusal of this request closely follow those explained previously.
The frequency of your requests
As you will recall we explained in our letter of 29 January 2014, that:
“We consider that, collectively, receipt of this number of requests within a short period of time, is in itself highly likely to be disruptive and create a considerable amount of work for ICO staff, in addition to their regular duties. We further consider that submission of this number of requests in quick succession is indicative of an obsessive approach to the ICO’s activities, and that a reasonable person would recognise that this would be likely to cause disruption.”
Despite the above explanation of 29 January 2014, which in itself was a refusal of 15 information requests, you have continued to submit requests to the ICO. In the month since this explanation was provided to you we have received a further six information requests from you including this one. We have explained to you the difficulties your frequent requests present for the ICO.
The subject of your request
Given that the ICO already publishes some information about the pension arrangements of its executive team and this request is the latest in a stream of requests on varying topics that you have made, we consider that your request is intended primarily to disrupt the work of the ICO and to continue the harassment of those individuals in support of your personal agenda, without any reasonable justification. As we have mentioned before, rather than being a genuine attempt to obtain information it seems this could be an attempt to find either a topic for an FOI request which will not be refused as vexatious (which is quite possibly itself a vexatious act) or an attempt to gather evidence to support the view you have recently expressed, that the ICO will refuse any request regardless of subject material.
This topic is therefore also one which we consider would add to the drain on the ICO’s resources which responding to your requests would create. It is therefore likely that future similar requests will also be refused without acknowledgement or response, under the provisions of section 17(6) of FOIA.
