Readers will recall that the Upper Tribunal decided in early 2011 that public authorities are entitled as of right to rely on any exception / exemption under either the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 at any stage of the proceedings.

In that case, the Upper Tribunal considered two appeals together. The first was an appeal brought by DEFRA, challenging the Tribunal’s decision that it could not now seek to rely on additional exemptions under the EIRs and that it was limited to the exemption that it had relied on at the time of its refusal to disclose environmental information to Mr Birkett (the founder of the cross-party Campaign for Clean Air in London). The second was an appeal brought by the Information Commissioner, challenging the Tribunal’s decision that the Home Office was entitled as of right to rely on new exemptions under FOIA.  At the hearing of the appeals before the Upper Tribunal, DEFRA submitted that it was entitled as of right to rely on the new exceptions/exemptions, Mr Birkett said that a public authority could not lawfully rely on new exceptions/exemptions before the Commissioner and the Tribunal, and the Commissioner adopted a middle course (namely that while there was no right to rely on new exceptions/exemptions, a public authority could be permitted to do so at the discretion of either the Commissioner or the Tribunal). The Upper Tribunal agreed with the public authorities that they could rely on a new exception/exemption at any time under either FOIA or the EIRs.

Mr Birkett appealed against this decision about the EIRs to the Court of Appeal: Birkett v The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [2011] EWCA Civ 1606.

Lord Justice Sullivan (with whose judgment Lord Justices Lloyd and Carnworth agreed) started by considering the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. The Council Directive 2003/4/EC on public access to environmental information implements the Aarhus Convention and is itself implemented in domestic law by the EIRs. Mr Birkett argued that it was necessary to interpret the Directive (and in turn the EIRs) as preventing a public authority from relying on a new or different exemption after the internal review stage; otherwise the complainant would not have an effective remedy because they would not know the reasons for the public authority’s refusal of their request for information.

Lord Justice Sullivan rejected Mr Birkett’s argument. He took into account that the Directive does not proceed upon “the unlikely premise” that within the prescribed “tight timescale the public authority will always “get it right the first time”, hence the review process provided for by Article 6. While some decisions may be relatively straightforward, the question whether some information, and if so how much of that information, falls within one or more of the exceptions may well be a question of some complexity. Are documents protected by legal advice or litigation privilege, are there intellectual property rights in certain information, etc.? The exceptions are concerned with important public interests.” (paragraph 21). He held that “The Court or other legal body conducting the review under Article 6(2) is not reviewing the decision made by the administrative reviewer under Article 6(1), it is reviewing “the acts or omissions of the public body concerned.” Thus, the court must consider de novo the propriety of releasing the information. Such a process is bound to discover errors and omissions in the exceptions relied upon in initial decisions, and it would be surprising, given the balancing exercise required by the Directive, if those errors were incapable of subsequent correction.” (paragraph 23).

Lord Justice Sullivan went on to give a hypothetical example of a public authority which mistakenly fails to rely in its refusal notification upon an adverse effect upon public security or national defence. Mr Birkett considered that this would happen rarely and that the solution was for the Commissioner / Tribunal to refuse to allow the public authority to rely on that exception / exemption late but to exercise its discretion to refuse to order disclosure of the information where that was necessary to avoid a breach of human rights (paragraphs 24 and 25).

Lord Justice Sullivan rejected Mr Birkett’s proposed solution. The public interests protected by the exemptions in the EIRs were not just human rights. Further, the Commissioner and the Tribunal were able to exercise effective judicial control, for example by requiring an appellant to set out his grounds at an early stage in the grounds of appeal. “Any application by the public authority to rely upon a new exception made after the time limit for its grounds of appeal/response would be subject to the Tribunal’s case management powers under rule 5; see also rules 22(4) and 23(5) which deal with the submission of notices of appeal and responses out of time.” (paragraph 28). He concluded that the public authority was entitled to rely as of right on new EIR exemptions in the notice of appeal to the Tribunal.

Note that there was no appeal from the Upper Tribunal’s decision in the Home Office case about FOIA, which remains good law. It is also noteworthy that the Commissioner chose not to participate in the appeal, which meant that the Court of Appeal did not hear submissions on the middle course which it had proposed to the Upper Tribunal in the Home Office case. Lord Justice Carnworth commented that “There would have been attractions in an alternative approach, which could have reconciled the need for urgency, implicit in the CJEU case-law, with the need for flexibility in the operation of the scheme” (paragraph 31).

As a result of this decision, the general rule is that public authorities can rely on any exception / exemption at any time under the EIRs or FOIA. However, note that there is still a different approach where the public authority seeks to rely on the cost exception in FOIA after its initial decision; see our post on this topic here.

Rachel Kamm

Tugendhat J ended in his Judgment on 19 December 2011 in AB v Barristers Benevolent Association Ltd [2011] EWHC 3413 (QB) by saying: “This judgment may alert practitioners to the possibility that information stored on a cache by Google may take several days to have removed”.

The BBA provides support to barristers in many different circumstances, including by way of loans. AB is a barrister who sought a loan from the BBA about six or seven years ago. On 5 December 2011 it was brought to her attention that confidential correspondence between herself and the BBA was available on the internet. She conducted a search through Google and found the information herself.

On 6 and 7 December 2011 the judge on out of hours duty granted an injunction without notice to the BBA. The injunction was discharged because an injunction against the BBA was unnecessary. There was no dispute that the documents in question contained confidential information, and that its confidentiality should be preserved.

On 5 December AB had contacted the BBA. The official she spoke to was already aware of the problem.  The BBA assured AB that the BBA’s IT consultant was addressing the issue as a matter of urgency.

The information remained accessible on Google throughout 6 December. The IT consultant said he was doing everything he could. He explained that the problem lay with Google, and that it might take some time for all their servers to be synchronised so as to remove the information from the caches. He explained he had been calling Google offices all over the world to try to get action, without success.

What had happened to give rise to this affair was explained by the IT consultant in a witness statement.  In 2005 or 2006 his firm had been asked by the BBA to assist in removing data from one hard drive to a new one. The process was carried out by copying data to a temporary file, which should have been deleted, but was not. It was retained inadvertently on a server. At the time that did no harm, because the server was not publicly available. However a technical change by the firm’s broadband supplier O2 led to the server becoming available to Google to pick up the data without the firm knowing that that was happening.

On Friday 2 December 2011 the BBA became aware that the information was available through Google. The BBA immediately contacted the IT consultant and asked him to deal with it as a matter of extreme urgency. The IT consultant’s firm identified what had happened. He removed the source of information from its server and disconnected the server from the internet. All the data that had been inadvertently stored was deleted. He then contacted Google via the webmaster tools requesting the removal of the material from the Google cache. This is where the problem arose.

On 5 and 6 December the IT consultant made numerous further attempts to contact Google to have the information removed from the caches as a matter of urgency. According to his evidence, and the e-mails that he has exhibited, he could not have expressed himself more forcefully, or more urgently, but he received no prompt response from Google. It was not until 10 pm on Tuesday 6 December that he found some files had been removed by Google.

On the morning of 7 December the IT consultant discovered that there was still information that had not been removed from the caches. He contacted Google again on more than one occasion.  It was not until Friday 9 December that Google had fully complied with his request to remove the information in its entirety.

Justice has published a report, Freedom from Suspicion, calling for “a fundamental overhaul of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act in order to protect the right of individual privacy from unnecessary, unwarranted and unchecked state intrusion“. The press notice highlights some of the report’s findings:

The Irish Commissioner for Environmental Information, Emily O’Reilly, on 30 September 2011 ruled that Anglo Irish Bank is subject to requests from the public relating to the environment, on the basis that for environmental information purposes the Bank, which was nationalised in January 2009, is a public authority.  The Bank had, under the European Communities (Access to Information on the Environment) Regulations 2007, refused requests relating to matters such as travel expenses and properties on the basis that it is a company, as indeed it is.  The Bank argued that it is not a public body, even though all its shares are held by the Minister of Finance.  The Commissioner, Case CEI/10/0007, disagreed.  The Bank can appeal to the High Court.

A company in which all the shares are directly held by a Minister of the Government is not amongst the entities specifically listed in EU Directive 2003/4/EC or the Aarhus Convention, but is specifically listed in the Irish Regulations, on their plain and ordinary reading.  The Commissioner ruled that the meaning of the Irish Regulations is clear and unambiguous, without any further conditions applying as to public administrative functions and responsibilities.  Nor did she regard this as being at odds with the Directive.  On the contrary she said that “it is very arguable that the Directive, in particular Recitals (11) and (24), encourages and enables Member States to take an expansive approach” to what constitutes a “public authority”.   (The same can be said of the Aarhus Convention, in particular Article 2.2.)  She did not accept that the definition of “public authority” in the Irish Regulations should be interpreted restrictively where a Member State has apparently chosen to take an expansive approach to the definition.

In the UK under FoIA and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, and their Scottish equivalents, a company which has no members other than a Minister of the Crown (including a Northern Ireland Minister) is a public authority.  No doubt a UK Court would agree that this is not at odds with the Directive, either as being in accordance with it or as being a legitimate expansion of it (and, in the case of the Environmental Information Regulations, made under the European Communities Act 1972, intra vires).