To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office, whether his Department has referred any freedom of information requests received by his Department to the central Cabinet Office Clearing House for advice on handling in the past two years.
Answered on
29 June 2021
The Clearing House function does not have full time members of staff, and its work is done by a small team of people in the FOI team, including the Deputy Director of Freedom of Information and Transparency, alongside their other day to day responsibilities. There is no separate budget for the Clearing House.
The Cabinet Office does not routinely capture data on the number of requests which are referred to the Clearing House. However, in 2020, Clearing House gave advice on 516 aggregated ‘round robins’ (requests made to more than one department and that have repeat characteristics); a small proportion of over 30,000 requests received by government departments in the same time period.
The Cabinet Office has referred requests to the Clearing House where appropriate and in line with the published criteria, which is available on gov.uk here - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cabinet-office-and-freedom-of-information.
Information on Freedom of Information statistics is also published on gov.uk here - https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics.