College of Policing

The complainant requested information from the College of Policing on 12 May 2024 about the strategic command course (SCC) with the executive leadership programme (ELP).
Commissioner’s Decision: 
Section 10(1) of FOIA states that a public authority must respond to a request within 20 working days. Section 17(3) of FOIA states that where a public authority is relying on a qualified exemption, it can have a “reasonable” extension of time to consider the public interest in maintaining the exemption or disclosing the information.
The section 45 Code of Practice states that usually this should be no more than a further 20 working days.  This means that the total time spent responding to a request should not exceed 40 working days unless there are exceptional circumstances.
The Commissioner does not consider there to be any exceptional circumstances and finds that, by failing to respond to the request within a reasonable time frame, the public authority has breached section 17(3) of FOIA.
3.    Steps:
The public authority must provide a substantive response to the request in accordance with its obligations under FOIA.  
The public authority must take this step within 30 calendar days of the date of this decision notice. Failure to comply may result in the Commissioner making written certification of this fact to the High Court pursuant to section 54 of FOIA and may be dealt with as a contempt of court.