Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, on how many occasions his Department applied the exemption in section 38(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (disclosure likely to endanger the physical or mental health of any individual) in wholly or partly refusing a freedom of information request in each of the last five years.

Statistics on the use of Freedom of Information exemptions are published by the Ministry of Justice (Table 10 of annual reports). They are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics.

These statistics provide the number of times section 38 as a whole has been used by each government department. More detailed figures for the constituent parts of section 38 are not readily available because our systems are not designed to provide a more detailed breakdown than is required for the published statistics.