UK-China Transparency has lodged a complaint with the Information Commissioner in response to Greater Manchester Police’s (GMP) refusal to provide UKCT with information about a visit of 15 staff from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau (PSB) to Manchester in May 2019
What we discovered:
UK-China Transparency was alerted to information online about the visit, including in the Bolton News and on the GMP’s Facebook page, according to which:
“On Friday 31 May fifteen police officers from the City of Wuhan Police in China, paid a visit to GMP to find out first-hand about policing in Greater Manchester.
“The Consulate General held a welcome party on Saturday for the visiting officers as well as members of the GMP local neighbourhood team for Chinatown and the GMP Dragon Boat Racing team.
“After sizing up the competition at the welcome party, both the GMP and Wuhan Police teams took part in the Dragon Boat Festival on Sunday 2nd June at Salford Quays which was beamed live back to millions of viewers in China by China Central Television . The competition has been won by team GMP for a number of years and after a hard fought race the Wuhan Team were victorious with GMP in second place.
“The Wuhan Team were invited to Force HQ on Monday 3rd June where they heard inputs on UK policing, GMP neighbourhood policing and how we police large events.”
What we asked:
We sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the GMP, asking for:
- The risk assessment conducted for the visit
- A list of the titles/ranks of the visiting officials from the Wuhan PSB
- A webpage about the visit that had been removed from the GMP’s website
- The titles/ranks and names of the members of a delegation of GMP officers that took part in a reciprocal visit to Wuhan in November 2019, and the minutes of meetings they took part in.
The GMP has refused to respond to this request in full, although notably it did state that it does not hold information about the titles/ranks of the visiting Wuhan PSB officials, or any minutes of meetings during the reciprocal visit to Wuhan.
UK-China Transparency has requested a internal review of GMP’s refusal to release details of its risk assessment. We are conducting further investigation of this matter.