The first-tier tribunal has overturned a ruling that the Ministry of Justice was entitled to turn down freedom of information requests relating to cleaners’ pay.

Richard O’Keefe, a caseworker at Southwark Law Centre acting on behalf of the United Voices of the World union, made the request to the MoJ in 2020 asking for details of pay awards to headquarters cleaners employed by a third party.

The MoJ had confirmed the information was held but refused to supply it, saying this was likely to prejudice the commercial interests of the third party, facilities management company OCS.

O’Keefe complained to the information commissioner but his challenge was rejected, with the commissioner accepting the MoJ’s stance that disclosure would ‘prejudice the effective conduct of public services by suppliers’.  It was ‘important that there is a “safe space” for government officers of the MoJ to have a robust confidential, deliberation process, on the pay issue’, the commissioner said. 

The union appealed to the tribunal arguing that it had sought costings to increase the pay of cleaning staff and not correspondence between the MoJ and OCS.

In United Voices of the World v Information Commissioner, the union’s appeal was allowed, with the tribunal adding that ‘elaborate arguments have been constructed by the MoJ and accepted by the commissioner without any critical evaluation of the factual basis of those arguments by either party’.

The tribunal heard that the background to the request was an employment tribunal claim against the justice secretary after the claimant’s employment was transferred from a different cleaning company. The claim had been struck out last October.

Tribunal Judge Christopher Hughes and tribunal members Naomi Matthews and Pieter de Waal concluded that the MoJ’s arguments about prejudice to commercial interests were ‘problematic’, making clear that the cost of the contract should be in the public domain.

They said: ‘There is frequently in cases such as this a claim that the basis upon which a contractor prices a contract is a trade secret and that revealing it would be to expose a trade secret. However in this as in other cases, in reality the claim obscures an unwillingness to have information disclosed. The information withheld by the MoJ falls well below any reasonable test for what constitutes a trade secret.’

There was no convincing evidence before the tribunal that disclosure of the withheld information would cause detriment or a breach of confidence, the judgment stated. 

 

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