Ministry of Defence FOI2026/09019: neither confirm nor deny

connected to this incident. 
 
4. Any correspondence between the Ministry of Defence and: 
 
+ South Wales Police 
+ Vale of Glamorgan Council 
+ Welsh Office (as it existed at the time) 
    concerning the eviction or associated operations. 
 
5. Any internal assessments, reviews, or after-action reports relating to the use of force or 
military involvement in this case. 
 
For clarity, the incident involved the removal of myself and my family from Ty Mawr (Great 
House Farm) in 1988, reportedly involving a significant and coordinated enforcement 
presence.” 
 
I am treating your correspondence as a request for information under the Freedom of Information 
Act 2000 (FOIA). 
 
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is unable to state whether or not we hold information in scope of 
the parts of your request that relate to Special Forces. To these, section 23(5) has been applied, 

which provides an exemption from the duty to confirm or deny whether information is held if doing 
so would involve the disclosure of any information which was directly or indirectly supplied by, or 
relates to, any of the bodies specified in subsection 23(5) of the FOIA, which lists the security 
bodies. Section 23(5) is an absolute exemption, which means it is not subject to a Public Interest 
Test. This should not be used as an indication that such information is or is not held. 
 
No information in scope of the remainder of your request is held. 
 
Under Section 16 of the Act (Advice and Assistance) you may find it helpful to note that, due to the 
age of the information requested, relevant information may be held at The National Archives, such 
as within Unit Historical Records, Commanders Diaries and policy files of the period: 
 
The National Archives,  
Kew,  
Richmond,  
Surrey,  
[address redacted]
 
Web Address: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk  
 
The National Archives is the UK government’s official archive. Its searchable catalogue 
(http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/) is available online, although you will not be 
able to view any documents online. 
 
To view information held open at The National Archives, you can either request a copy by clicking 
‘request a copy’ on the catalogue entry for the required file, which will incur a charge, or visit The 
National Archives in person.  
 
If you decide to visit The National Archives you will either need a Reader’s Ticket, or if you do not 
possess one you will have to obtain one at the registration desk. For this you will require some 
form of identification, a passport, driving licence etc. The National Archives does not charge for 
reader’s tickets. Alternatively, you may consider employing a researcher to carry out the work for 
you. If you do decide to do this, then The National Archives will supply you with a list of 
independent researchers who will make a charge for their time. The National Archives do not carry 
out research on individual members of the public’s behalf. 
 
A request for the release of information held closed at The National Archives should be made to 
The National Archives. You can make a FOIA request by clicking ‘submit an FOI request’ on the 
Discovery catalogue page of the file in question. A request for information on other topics which 
are retained by MOD, which can be identified by the ‘held by’ field of a MOD record containing 
‘creating government department or its successor, not available at The National Archives’, should 
be made to [email redacted]. 
 
If you have any queries regarding the content of this letter, please contact this office in the first 
instance. 
 
If you wish to complain about the handling of your request, or the content of this response, you can 
request an independent internal review by contacting the Information Rights Compliance team, 
[address redacted]
Please note that any request for an internal review should be made within 40 working days of the 
date of this response.  
 
If you remain dissatisfied following an internal review, you may raise your complaint directly to the 
Information Commissioner under the provisions of Section 50 of the Act. Please note that the 
Information Commissioner will not normally investigate your case until a MOD internal review 
process has been completed. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at: Information 
[address redacted]

of the role and powers of the Information Commissioner can be found on the Commissioner's 
website at https://ico.org.uk/. 
 
 
Yours sincerely, 
 
Defence Business Services Records Review – FOI Team