A local newspaper group is to appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office over the refusal by the Ministry of Justice to give it the names of 14 convicted prisoners who have escaped from jails in its area.

The MoJ has refused to tell the Kent Messenger the names of the fugitives on the grounds that doing so would be a breach of the Data Protection Act because their names are what it described in a letter as “personal sensitive data”.

The newspaper reported in May that a Freedom of Information request to the MoJ had disclosed that 14 inmates who had escaped from jails in the county in the previous decade were still on the run.