NI v Information Commissioner and Buckinghamshire County Council (Information rights : Freedom of Information - exceptions)

This is an appeal by Mr Innes, the information requester, against a decision of a First-tier Tribunal made on 22 March 2016. For the reasons set out below I dismiss the appeal.

Although it is not directly material to this appeal, Mr Innes contended that, even before the addition (with effect from 1 September 2013) of subsection 1A to s.11 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, s.11 had entitled him to require the information to be provided in the form of an Excel file, rather than merely a PDF file, and he eventually succeeded in that contention in a decision of the Court of Appeal ( Innes v Information Commisioner [2014] EWCA Civ 1086 ; [2015] 2 All ER 560 ) given on 31 July 2014. The information was then provided by the Council in that form.

As I have noted, with effect from 1 September 2013 subsection (1A) was added to s.11 of FOIA. That subsection provides that where an applicant expresses a preference for information which �is, or forms part of, a dataset� to be provided in electronic form, the public authority must, �so far as reasonably practicable, provide the information in an electronic form which is capable of reuse.�

Prior to the Court of Appeal�s decision Mr Innes had then on 19 May 2014 made a further freedom of information request, which is the one at issue in this appeal. It was in the following terms:

�It has been indicated to me by the Information Commissioner that the information requested below would indeed fall in the scope of the new data set provisions.