[2024] UKUT 320 (AAC)

In summary, the Appellant’s principal submission was that the requirement for the regulation 6(1)(b) test to be satisfied only if ‘the information is … easily accessible to the applicant in another form or format’ must be intended to confer some protection on the requester. If these words refer to the ability of the requester to ‘get at’ (in the First-tier Tribunal’s words) the information then, in order to have any effect, Mr Craddock contended, they must relate to the ability of the requester to go on and use the information. If they merely guarantee that the requester can ‘view’ the data, then they are doing no more than requiring compliance with the EIR. The requirement for the information to be ‘easily accessible to the applicant’, he argued, is intended to address not simply whether the applicant may view the information, but whether, in doing so, it is made available in some useful and potentially productive way.

The Respondent characterised the substance of the Appellant’s complaint not in terms of being that he cannot readily access the digital tithe maps at the Council’s facility (i.e. view them), but rather that the format in question is not a convenient one for the purposes of his own research. However, according to Mr Metcalfe, the test of accessibility under regulation 6(1)(b) is accessibility ‘to the applicant’, and not accessibility to his or her computer. Information may be ‘easily accessible’ to an applicant, even if it is provided in a form or format that is less convenient to him. Nor, he submitted, is there any support in either the EIR, the Directive or the Convention for the question of accessibility under regulation 6(1)(b) being determined by reference to either (i) the purposes an applicant may wish to use the information for, or (ii) the ease with which the applicant can transfer the information between his different devices. Again, although regulation 6(1) EIR and section 11(1) FOIA both enable applicants to receive information in a particular format, there is no requirement on the public authority under regulation 6(1)(b) to consider the reasonable practicability of doing so. The test is simply and solely whether the environmental information in question is (a) ‘already publicly available’; and (b) ‘easily accessible to the applicant’ in another format.