Dear Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment,

On 7 July I attempted to make an OIA request to University of Canterbury regarding statistics including requests for mediation, and they claim not to hold this information. It is possible you can help me fill some of these gaps.

Can you please advise me, for the period from 1 January 2010 until 7 July 2014, how many requests did MBIE or its predecessor organisations receive where The University of Canterbury would be one of the parties involved, either lodging the request or as the respondent?

Of these requests, can you let me know the number that fall into each of four categories:
- Mediation request withdrawn prior to going to mediation.
- Mediation went ahead.
- Mediation refused by The University of Canterbury or their representative.
- Mediation refused by the staff member, alleged staff member, or their representative.

If you hold the information in an easily accessible format, can you also break these statistics down by whether or not the staff (or alleged staff) member was represented by a Union?

Yours faithfully,

Dan Hawke

Dear Ms. Potter,

Thank you for your response - prior to deciding whether to ask the Ombudsman to review your decision to decline my request, can you please clarify why you think section 148 applies here? To clarify my request, I am not requesting any "statement, admission, document, or information disclosed or made in the course of the provision of mediation services" (as per 148.4) - merely non-individually-identifiable statistics about a wide time period, while researching the mediation history of the University. To be absolutely clear, I expect only numerical statistics to help categorise mediation requests prior to mediation actually starting - and have not requested anything that would reveal or request information about any decisions made during, or the results of any mediation.

Hopefully, this additional clarification allows you to continue with my request, but please let me know if it doesn't.

Yours sincerely,

Dan Hawke