Thu, 29 Jan 2015

NHS Trust forced to publish unredacted full report about massive police deployment to mental health ward

For the past two years I have been attempting to uncover what happened during two critical incidents that occurred at the River House facility operated by the South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust on 2012-10-01. I eventually exposed that 48 Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) officers were deployed and that four TSG officers drew their Tasers on the mental health ward.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, I got SLaM to initially publish a redacted summary report and then to unredact it, fully. This revealed it was hiding a full report. Using that information, I got it to publish an extensively redacted version of the full report. After an internal review in which SLaM found it was justified to do all these redactions on health and safety, and third party personal data, last week, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) disagreed and decided against SLaM:

South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

21 January 2015, Health (NHS)

The complainant has requested a copy of an investigation report that was commissioned to investigate an incident that occurred on a ward at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (the Trust) in late 2012. The Trust initially relied on the future publication exemption (section 22) in FOIA to withhold a version of the report. Upon its publication, parts of the report were withheld under the health and safety (section 38) and third party personal data (section 40(2)) exemptions in FOIA, although these were later released to the complainant. However, during the course of the Commissioner’s investigation it became apparent that the Trust had only considered a summary of the report rather than a version containing the complete findings. A further partial disclosure of the complete report was made with the remaining information withheld under sections 38(1)(b) and 40(2) of FOIA. The Commissioner has found that section 40(2) but not section 38(1)(b) of FOIA is engaged. He therefore requires the disclosure of the information to which section 38(1)(b) has been applied. The public authority must take these steps within 35 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 the Act and may be dealt with as a contempt of court. [Emphasis added]

FOI 38: Upheld   FOI 40: Partly upheld

Decision notice FS50514652

Here are my previous posts about this incident:

SLaM has to publish an unredacted version of its full report that complies with the ICO's decision by 2015-03-25.

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