‘As is so often the way in information rights, the Upper Tribunal reaches a perfectly sensible decision and gives practical guidance which others can actually apply, only for the Court of Appeal to insist on saying mostly the same thing but less clearly and less helpfully. As a result, the Upper Tribunal then has to reconsider the area and steer the law back to a productive course. So it was in Department for Transport & Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency & Porsche Cars GB Ltd v Information Commissioner & Cieslik [2018] UKUT 127 (AAC) (Cieslik), on the – to put it politely – potential interpretative difficulties on the issue of the meaning of “environmental information” under the EIR following the ‘guidance’ of the Court of Appeal in Department for Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy v Information Commissioner & Henney [2017] EWCA Civ 844 (see here). And the judgment of Judge Markus QC in Cieslik is a genuinely important and valuable exercise in course correction.’
Panopticon, 27th April 2018
Source: panopticonblog.com
