Question to the Northern Ireland Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, on how many occasions her 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.

The Department does not separately record use of exemptions under section 38(a) and 38(b), but does record use of section 38 as a whole. During the past 5 years this exemption was used three times in 2010, three times in 2013 and not used in 2011, 2012 and 2014.

Statistics on the use of Freedom of Information exemptions are published by the Ministry of Justice (Table 10 of annual reports). They are available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-foi-statistics.