[I tend to do a lot my posting these days on LinkedIn, and less here. But the combination of LinkedIn’s poor search capability and my memory means I forget about some things I’ve written about that I’d quite like to remember. So I’m going to put some of them on this blog to remind me. This one is on a doozy of a Tribunal judgment.]
This Information Tribunal judgment about whether photographs of planning notices should be disclosed begins with a long quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and gets even more extraordinary as it goes on.
By the end of the judgment the judge has called the Information Commissioner’s Office’s decision a “pitiful failure to understand the scope and significance of material in the public domain and the role of data protection in protecting rights”, uses the term “bankruptcy” to describe the approach to the matter by both the ICO and Shropshire Council, and appears to have declared the Council’s handling of not just the individual planning application, but its planning policy as a whole unlawful (the judgment says, for instance that the council’s implementation of The Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 “failed to accord local residents their rights”).
This last point surely illustrates the Tribunal straying well beyond its jurisdiction, and it is difficult to see how it will escape having its judgment appealed. That’s actually a pity, because the underlying point in it is that the ICO’s approach failed to understand that data protection law has to be considered “in relation to its function in society and be balanced against other fundamental rights” (recital 4 GDPR) and failed to consider the Environmental Information Regulations’ context, whereby access to environmental information is one of the three pillars of the Aarhus Convention – the others being public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters.
And even if the judgment gets appealed, I would hope the ICO acknowledges the key point that data protection rights don’t automatically trump all other rights.
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