17. LETTER
TO
ASSISTANT
COMMISSIONER
JANET
WILLIAMS
QPM FROM
THE
COMMISSIONER,
7 MAY
2009
Thank you for your recent letter which I received
on 30 April in response to mine of 22 April about my request for
help in identifying the location of Ms Smith's overnight stays
in London and Redditch since her appointment as Home Secretary.
I was grateful to receive your advice. In the light
of what you say, I will need to consider whether my request is
so central to my inquiry that I must refer this matter to the
Committee on Standards and Privileges for it to consider whether
to exercise its power to ask you for your papers and records in
relation to this matter. But, before, considering this further,
it would be very helpful if you could give me some further guidance
on what you say in the penultimate paragraph of your letter. You
refer there to not being able to release the information I have
requested on the basis of considerations at this time, but should
the position change, you would be content to reconsider that view.
Could you let me know what changed conditions you consider would
be necessary in order for you to reconsider your view? Could you
also let me know what reassurances from me might help to meet
your security/privacy concerns, given that I am asking only for
annualized returns and assuming that the appropriate level of
consent is provided by the data subject.
You asked about the confidentiality of our correspondence.
I dealt with this point in the penultimate paragraph of my letter
to the Commissioner of 22 April. In effect, our correspondence
is in confidence at this stage. I may need to report to the Committee
if I were to decide that I needed them to consider whether to
call upon you for papers and information, otherwise, I would,
as I explained in my previous letter, expect to show our correspondence
to the Rt Hon Jacqui Smith MP and to include it, with any suitable
redactions, in the evidence I would submit to the Committee on
Standards and Privileges in any memorandum I prepared for that
Committee, which the Committee would expect to publish with its
report. It is open to you to ask me not to submit all the evidence
to the Committee and to ask the Committee not to publish the evidence
I show them.
I look forward to hearing from you. If you would
like to discuss this further, please let me know.
7 May 2009
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