[reposted from LinkedIn]
Under section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), the Information Commissioner must – subject to exceptions applying – serve a decision notice on a “public authority” when a requester applies for such a notice to be made. Public authorities are, in the main, listed in Schedule One to the Act (some are also designated by statutory instrument, or are public authorities by virtue of being owned by one or more other public authorities).
Under section 58 of FOIA, upon appeal to the Information Tribunal, the Tribunal must uphold the appeal, or substitute a replacement, if it considers that the decision notice is “not in accordance with the law”.
I’d like to ask this – if the decision notice gets the name of the public authority wrong, is it “not in accordance with the law”?
Because that is what appears to be the case with countless decision notices served on educational institutions.
Someone recently made an FOI request to ask why the Commissioner had changed his terminology, because some decision notices are addressed to, say, the “University of Exeter”, while others are addressed to the “Governing Body of the University of Exeter”. The answer given by the Information Commissioner’s Office is that was not a change of approach, but, rather, that the examples of the former were “due to an error”.
This in itself is pretty extraordinary, but it doesn’t look like it’s just a historic error which has now been corrected, because if one looks, for example, at the decision notices served this year on UCL, four have (presumably correctly) been served on the Council of the University of London, and three have (presumably incorrectly) been served on “University College London”. [UPDATE: Tony Mann, in the comments, draws my attention to what seems to be an error in the “correct” notices – the “Council of the University of London” is a different body to the “Council of University College London”.]
One has to ask two things: 1) are those three notices not in accordance with the law? 2) if the ICO knows that it is an error to serve a notice not using the correct terminology, why on earth is it still doing so?
The views in this post (and indeed most posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
informationrightsandwrongs 
Probably a silly question, but the University of London and University College London are different institutions. So is the “Council of the University of London” a different organisation from UCL?
No, it’s a good question. You’re quite right – even though UCL is part of the UoL federation it has its own governing body, in the form of a council (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/governance-compliance/council), so it looks like even the “corrected” notices are wrong!
I guess it all depends on what “served on” means but in practice they will probably have been sent to the right place. I’d be a bit surprised if the tribunal or a court found them to be actually invalid – at most they are in need of a technical correction if anyone took the point.
Maybe, but I can certainly imagine some instances where that would not be the case.
I’d still be surprised if it led to any late-breaking issues. Either the DN was in favour of the complainant and then they would have already asked the ICO to take action if the PA didn’t comply due to non-receipt, or it was in favour of the PA and then they probably don’t care that much.
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