In a case involving a request for information on the number of cases allocated to and struck out by High Court masters in particular years, the Information Tribunal has clarified the circumstances in which a public authority can reject a request for information because it does not hold the relevant data in the form in which it is requested. The tribunal said that if the request required raw data to be manipulated, it could be refused on the basis that the data was not "held" within the terms of section 1(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, but only if the necessary manipulation would require an exercise of skill and judgment. In the present case, an unskilled person could inspect the court records in order to extract and collate the relevant information, so the Ministry of Justice could not legitimately deny the request on the ground that it did not hold the information. (The tribunal conceded that the Ministry could properly reject the request on the ground that collating a reply would exceed the statutory cost limit.) Case: M L Johnson v Information Commissioner and Ministry of Justice, 13 July 2007.