Relight My FOIA

Over the last few years, I have been looking into how effectively the police protect women and children.

To do this, I have been filing FOI requests for internal police documents called “problem profiles”.

These reports are really useful, because they concisely set out a police force’s performance in these specific crime areas, and usually come with internal recommendations on what needs to be improved.

Of course, that also shows where things are going wrong, crucial for police accountability.

In 2021, I was able to use these reports to reveal how police forces were concerned about their ability to protect children, with one force finding that “much of the current focus surrounds safeguarding victims with little evidence of the exploiters being investigated.”

They also revealed how some children were going missing on hundreds of occasions.

After a transparency battle, I was also able to reveal how in South Yorkshire, the area of the grooming gang scandal exposed by my late colleague Andrew Norfolk, the police were still not routinely recording the ethnicity of perpetrators, despite inquiries finding a squeamishness about race of perpetrators to be a key driver of the scandal.

In 2022, I moved on to investigate how police were handling violence against women and girls. This had been a hot topic after several high profile murders, most notoriously that of Sarah Everard, murdered by police officer Wayne Couzens.

Little did I know, this would turn into the single most complex FOI appeal I have ever worked on.

The Met says no

In April 2022, I filed a request to all police forces asking for a list of the reports they held on policing violence against women and girls.

The Met came back telling me they held a copy of something called a “serious sexual offences problem profile”. I requested a copy of this in August.

Under FOI rules, public bodies must respond within 20 working days and can take an extra 20 days to consider complex public interest tests.

The force broke these rules. When it eventually responded, it refused to release a single word of the report, citing a potential threat to its ability to conduct investigations.

I appealed this, and the Met upheld its position.

I then had to take this case to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates FOI, making the case that the public needed to see this report to hold the Met accountable.  

The Met failed to advance substantive arguments as to why the report was exempt. As a result, the ICO ordered the report to be released in June 2023.

In many cases, public bodies accept the rulings of the ICO, and act accordingly. The Met did not. It declined to comply with the order, and at public expense, challenged the disclosure order to the courts.

A hearing was listed for the information tribunal for January 2024.

At the 11th hour, just before a hearing was listed to hear the merits of the case, the Met withdrew its appeal, releasing a heavily redacted version of the report.

This report, disclosed 14 months after the original request, revealed that rapists are likely to have avoided justice because the Metropolitan Police has been routinely failing to record basic details about sex offenders and their victims, despite repeatedly being told by regulators that its methods are failing women and girls.

However, much of the report remained blacked out.

This is where things got interesting.

Procedural pandemonium  

We asked that a hearing go ahead, as significant portions of the report were still in dispute.

The ICO declined to defend its decision that the whole report must be disclosed.

The tribunal judge, however, agreed to the Met’s request and allowed it to withdraw, but this denied us the chance to try to obtain a court order to force the Met to release more of the report.

This left me in a bind. In effect, I was left in a position where I had not been given a substantive chance to argue the case.

We decided to appeal the judge’s decision, given that this appeared to, in practice, compromise my information rights.

We had a hearing at the Upper Tier Tribunal in November 2024, arguing that the decision to allow the withdrawal was wrong, and I should be allowed my day in court to make the case for further disclosure.

We won that case. This decision set case law which means that in future, there must be a hearing before such a withdrawal can be permitted.

That prevents other public bodies using the same legal strategy that the Metropolitan Police attempted.

The case was sent back to the First Tier Tribunal, and in August last year, the case was finally heard in full, with the judge ordering the disclosure of almost all of the report in December.

We then only received this report, after we raised the prospect of contempt of court procedures with the Met.

The newly disclosed sections of the report revealed another serious problem. High numbers of victims were withdrawing their cases.

The report says that across the financial years ending 2020 and 2021, victims withdrew allegations of rape or sexual assault by strangers a total of 265 times.

In 527 cases, crime records were flagged with the label “no other codes apply”, which could indicate a lack of information about the victim.

Damaging delays

I am very grateful to The Times’ legal team and the lawyers who represented us in this arduous case, without whom this document would never have come to light.

But if it takes a major newspaper with legal resources more than three years to obtain a document which should never for the most part have been withheld, the system is deeply broken.

The long delay means the information is less useful as it is less timely, making it harder to hold the Met to account.

One tactic public authorities could block transparency has been nixed, and it is fun to see “Greenwood” now being cited in other cases as precedent.

But a lot of the Met’s approach here can be repeated by any public authority.

Missing deadlines, refusing everything without good legal reason, appealing to the tribunal at significant public expense, and then taking ones time through that process, is a tactic available to any public authority.

The right of disclosure under FOIA becomes meaningless when those with power can deploy public resources to resist that transparency if they really don’t want to disclose something.

The case also raises a wider concern about the Met Police.

Policing by consent requires the trust of the public, and to do that, policing authorities must show transparency as far as is possible. That didn’t happen here.

That approach to transparency, and the role of the press in holding policing to account, reinforces long standing concerns about the Met.

Such an attitude compromises public trust, and risks putting members of the public in harm’s way by preventing problems being fixed before they have serious, and even deadly consequences.

A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said: “It would be misleading to suggest withdrawals are solely or mostly linked to trust in the police when multiple factors can contribute to each decision.”

“Since this data was compiled, we’ve transformed the way we handle serious sexual offences. We’re seeing more arrests, a tripling of charges for rape and serious sexual offences and more victim-survivors bravely reporting.”

The force said the tribunal process clarified what could be lawfully disclosed and it complied fully with the final decision.

Apologies for the length of time since the last blog, I am working on a very exciting project outside of my job at The Times which is taking up most of my free time. Watch this space…

Image credit: Met police media handout