The First-tier Tribunal has dismissed a FOIA appeal against the Ministry of Justice's refusal to provide information about IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) licence holders' travel applications, upholding the cost limit exemption under section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and finding that the MoJ had met its advice and assistance duty under section 16.
In AE v The Information Commissioner and Ministry of Justice [2026] UKFTT 00939 (GRC), decided on the papers by Judge Kiai, Member Taylor and Member Palmer-Dunk on 15 June 2026, the Tribunal rejected a sustained challenge to the evidential basis of the MoJ's cost estimate and provided clear guidance on the limits of both the reasonable estimate standard under section 12 and the advice and assistance duty under section 16.
The anonymised appellant had sought information from the MoJ about IPP licence holders who had applied to the probation service to travel abroad. The request went through several iterations, narrowing from a twelve-year national dataset to a six-year period at Havant Probation Office alone. The MoJ refused each version under section 12 FOIA, on the basis that the information was not held centrally but embedded in individual offender case files requiring manual review. It estimated approximately 120 files over six years at around 60 minutes each, well above the £600 cost limit, equivalent to 24 hours at £25 per hour. The ICO upheld the refusal by decision notice dated 20 May 2025.
On section 12, the appellant argued the cost estimate lacked adequate evidential foundation: the assumed volume of approximately 20 cases per year was unsupported, the 60-minute per-file estimate was excessive, no sampling exercise had been conducted, and the information could in practice be extracted by database query.
The Tribunal rejected each argument. It held that the estimate was grounded in operational knowledge of probation case management systems, that the information was genuinely not amenable to automated extraction, and that the Commissioner had not accepted it uncritically. On sampling, the Tribunal confirmed there is no legal requirement for a public authority to conduct a sampling exercise before relying on section 12, and that its absence does not without more render an estimate unreasonable. The Tribunal also rejected the argument that partial or aggregated disclosure could have been provided within the cost limit, finding that extracting even aggregate figures would require substantially the same manual process.
On section 16, the appellant argued the advice given was generic and repetitive, and that the MoJ had not explained why a request limited to 12 months would fall within the cost limit. The Tribunal disagreed. It confirmed that section 16 does not require a public authority to provide worked cost calculations or to guarantee that a refined request will succeed. It requires only that the requester be placed in a position to understand the nature of the difficulty and identify a sensible avenue of refinement. The MoJ had consistently identified temporal scope as the key cost driver and had pointed to a shorter timeframe as the obvious remedy. That was sufficient.
The appellant's argument that treating each refined request as a new request - thereby resetting the section 10 statutory clock - was procedurally unfair was found to fall outside the Tribunal's jurisdiction on a section 57 appeal, as it had not been considered in the decision notice. The Tribunal nonetheless addressed it, holding that a materially revised request is properly treated as a new request and that the approach is neither illogical nor unfair. An allegation of deliberate obstruction by the MoJ was dismissed as wholly unsupported by the evidence.
