On his last day as Justice Secretary, David Lammy was accused of ‘fighting to cover up foreigners’ crimes’. This is because the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which he led is taking legal action against the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), seeking to overturn a ruling which instructed them to publish conviction data by nationality and offence type for the past seven years. This ICO ruling followed a Freedom of Information request by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC).
Why are they so determined to avoid publishing the data? In truth, there seems to be no good reason
I spoke with Rob Bates, the CMC’s Director, who explained to me what has happened:
‘We first requested the data in June last year, only to be met with resistance from the Ministry of Justice which claimed the information was exempt from disclosure because it pertained to personal information. In July last year we escalated the case to the Information Commissioner’s Office who gave the MoJ the opportunity to set out their case.
Over a year after the original request, last month the ICO finally ruled that the MoJ has “not demonstrated” how this dataset would lead to the identification of individuals, nor how the costs involved in its production would be excessive, and that the MoJ must “disclose the requested information”.’
