Lourenco v (a) The Information Commissioner (2) London Borough of Barnet (Information Rights): [2024] UKUT 111 (AAC)
Upper Tribunal Administrative Appeals Chamber decision by Judge Church on 28 March 2024.
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Judicial Summary
In this case I consider, but decline to decide, whether the limits to the First-tier Tribunal ‘s statutory jurisdiction necessarily preclude it from considering, as a subsidiary matter, whether information that has been requested under the Environmental Information Request (EIR) is required to be disclosed by the public authority under the Local Government Act 1972 (LGA), and whether any such requirement to disclose under that Act should be factored into the public interest balancing exercise that must be carried out under the EIR.
I declined to determine that issue because, on the facts of this case, it was clear that the public authority’s reliance on the exemption under Schedule 12A LGA would not (contrary to the Appellant’s case) have been excluded as a result of the operation of paragraph 9 (which applies in circumstances where a local planning authority may grant itself planning permission or permission in principle pursuant to regulation 3 of the Town and Country Planning General Regulations 1992). Because both the information request and the decision to refuse it were made at a stage when the development proposals for the Hendon Hub (which were at the heart of the case) were at a relatively early stage, long before any planning application was submitted, paragraph 9 wouldn’t bite to exclude reliance on the Schedule 12A exemption (following the approach in R (Helen Stride) v Wiltshire County Council [2022] EWHC 1476 (Admin)).