Information Commissioner's Office
| Case Outcome | Complaint not upheld |
| Subject Matter | Other |
| Court | Information Commissioner (UK) |
| Record Number | IC-94169-V2H1 |
| Date | 05 January 2022 |
| Respondent | Information Commissioner's Office |
Reference: IC-94169-V2H1
1
Decision notice
Date: 5 January 2022
Public Authority: Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
Address: Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
SK9 5AF
Note
This decision notice concerns a complaint made against the Information
Commissioner (‘the Commissioner’). The Commissioner is both the regulator
under a duty as regulator to make a formal determination of a complaint
made against her as a public authority. It should be noted, however, that the
complainant has a right of appeal against the Commissioner’s decision,
details of which are given at the end of this notice. In this notice the term
‘ICO’ is used to denote the ICO dealing with the request, and the term
‘Commissioner’ denotes the ICO dealing with the complaint.
Decision (including any steps ordered)
1. The complainant has requested all the information held by the ICO that
guides the ICO's interpretation of any aspect of "Schedule 12A of the
Local Government Act (LGA) 1972”. The ICO refused to comply with the
request citing section 12 of FOIA.
2. The Commissioner’s decision is that the ICO is entitled to rely on section
12(1) of the FOIA in this case. He therefore does not require any further
action to be taken.
Reference: IC-94169-V2H1
2
Request and response
3. On 21 December 2020, the complainant wrote to the ICO and requested
information in the following terms:
“REQUEST
I am seeking access ALL information held by the ICO that guides the
ICO's interpretation of ANY aspect of "Schedule 12A of the Local
Government Act (LGA) 1972".
Note: Schedule 12A of LGA deals with the Public Interest Test that
needs to be completed before a local council can make an Agenda item
"exempt" from the default position of full transparency (i.e. it allows the
Council to exclude the public from attending physical or virtual
discussions on an exempt agenda item and also excludes the public from
access to documents prepared for that exempt agenda item)
CONTEXT
To expand on the above, information held by ICO on this topic of
"Schedule 12A of LGA" can be classified as: ICO Public Facing, ICO
Decision Notices and ICO Internal:
1) ICO Public Facing. As far as I am aware, the only public-facing
document that references Schedule 12A is the document: "eir
confidentiality of proceedings.pdf". I have a copy of this Email Freedom
of Informa… Page 1 of 4 17/03/2021 document but wish to know if there
are other public-facing documents I may have missed.
2) ICO Decision Notices. As far as I am aware, the ICO's website search
functionality does not provide the ability to free text search for the term
"Schedule 12A" across all DNs (or even across the whole ICO website).
Please correct me if I am wrong. I therefore used the Google advanced
search functionality using the "site:" search modifier to identify some 24
hits for "Schedule 12A" across those aspects of the ICO website indexed
by Google
(site:https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%
3A%2F%2Fico.org.uk%2F&data=04%7C01%
7Cicoaccessinformation%40ico.org.uk%
7C8464ee55fa4b47f395db08d8a5ab0d7c%
7C501293238fab4000adc1c4cfebfa21e6%7C1%7C0%
7C637441501368559960%7CUnknown%
7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJB
TiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%
7C1000&sdata=Kh5bW1cTkBpOnDacqY3bJ6q4r5ZIVCNFuPOS
qn5pzfs%3D&reserved=0 "schedule 12a"). Under this heading, I am
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