To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, with reference to her Department's Freedom of Information Act response FOI2026/17558 of 20 July 2026, on what date the Department deleted the responses to the Call for Evidence on the Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia Definition; whether this included deleting the organisational responses; and whether the Department holds any whole or partial list of which organisations responded.
Answered on
7 October 2026
This answer is a correction from the original answer.
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The Department’s response to the Freedom of Information request referenced by the Member was based on the information identified through searches undertaken at that time. Further searches have established that the underlying response dataset is still held on Departmental systems. Officials are ensuring that the extant dataset is retained and managed in accordance with the Department's information management requirements.
Ministers were not involved in operational decisions regarding the handling or retention of information submitted to the Call for Evidence.
Original answer
The Call for Evidence was undertaken to support the independent Working Group on a definition of anti-Muslim hostility. The information collected through the exercise contained personal and special category data. The published Privacy Notice in the Call for Evidence form stated that the data would be shared with the Working Group and used for the purposes of the Working Group only.
In line with that Privacy Notice, the data was processed for the purposes of supporting the Working Group and retained for a period while Ministers considered the Working Group's advice. As per the commitment in the Privacy Notice and in accordance with the GDPR requirements for personal and special category data, the underlying dataset was then disposed of. This included responses submitted by both individuals and organisations.
The Government does not routinely publish the details of individual respondents to calls for evidence