The SAR Surgery is a flexible service designed to assist you with tricky subject access requests. This might be a quick consultation about how to deal properly with the request when it comes it. It might be working through the material that has come back after a search. It can be anything in between. My aim is to help you to give a fair, reasonable and defensible response to the most difficult and challenging SARs.

After signing a non-disclosure agreement, you provide me with as much information as you are comfortable with. If possible, you tell me about the request without identifying details and I can give you a solid steer. The more information you can provide, the easier it will be for me to give you a steer, and the less I will charge you as a result.

I can review individual requests and work through all the relevant material itself, even down to doing the physical redactions. But you almost certainly have staff you’re already paying who can do redactions and the like. My aim is to provide a practical, actionable approach to the request, balancing the competing interests that often make a SAR so hard to process. I am not here to milk you for as many hours as I can get; if I can summarise a sound approach in a couple of hours and set you running on a response that makes sense, that’s a good result for everyone including the applicant.

If you have a challenging SAR (or a pile of them), get in touch.