Secretary of State for the Home Department (Home Office)

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 to warrant a failure to respond for over 6 months 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.