Council wins Tribunal appeal over FOI request for information on declared interests of elected mayor

Bristol City Council’s elected mayor Marvin Rees is entitled to keep confidential certain declarations of interest regarding land and property he owns.

The First-Tier Tribunal General Regulatory Chamber (Information Rights) found the Information Commissioner made a legal error in finding that some of the requested information should be disclosed.

Tribunal Judge Stephen Cragg KC, who sat with members Anne Chafer and Kate Grimley Evans, said in his ruling that the exemption under s44 of the Freedom of Information Act applied to the material concerned.

A request was made in April 2022 to Bristol City Council for copies of declarations or registers of interests and the next month the council provided a redacted copy of the mayor's register of interests form, citing section 40(2) FOIA to withhold the redacted information.

The requester complained to the Commissioner as they were unhappy about redactions related to property and land owned by the mayor.

After considering this the Commissioner decided disclosure of the withheld information was necessary to meet the requester’s legitimate interest but that disclosure of some of it would contravene data protection regulations and so would be exempt under section 40(2) FOIA.

It would though be lawful, fair and transparent to disclose other parts of the withheld information which were in a confidential annex to the decision notice.

Bristol appealed and asked the tribunal to overturn the Commissioner's decision and dismiss the requester's complaint on the basis the council was correct to withhold the requested information

The council argued that inclusion of sensitive information on the register of members' interests is subject, under the Localism Act 2011, to the discretion of the monitoring officer, and this operates as a statutory bar to disclosure under section 44 FOIA.

It said it was within the monitoring officer’s power to accede to the mayor's request not to include the information on the public register and “if this information is required to be disclosed, then the discretion of the monitoring officer to make this decision will effectively have been overruled by the decision of the ICO”.

The tribunal said: “We are satisfied, as is the commissioner, that the mayor and the monitoring officer have carried out a consideration of the relevant interest for the purposes of s.32(1)(b) of 2011 Act and that a decision was taken that the information did fall within the category of 'sensitive interest' such that s.32(2) of the 2011 Act is engaged prohibiting the publishing of the details of the interest on the published version of the register.”

Its ruling said that once the discretion not to publish has been exercised “we are satisfied that the disclosure of the withheld information is prohibited by s32(2) of the 2011 Act and therefore…the exemption in s44 FOIA is necessarily engaged”.

Mr Rees has been elected mayor since 2016 but the post is to be abolished next year after a referendum on its continuation.

Mark Smulian