Dear all
Could I have thoughts on the following?
We are increasingly getting huge requests for infomation regarding parking from people who are disputing their parking tickets. With the increase of websites telling them how to appeal and which technicalities to use, requests for Traffic Regs Orders (TROs), policies and all info is becoming more common. A £30 ticket is ending up costing us thousands in staff time thanks to info access legislation.
Quite often it is a mixture of FOI/EIR and DP. Where there is info relating to marking of bays, policies, decisions taken etc it would seem to fall under EIR and there has indeed been a decison where it was shown that a policy about parking enforcement could be exempt from release under EIR as it may affect the public authority's ability to manage the service effectively I believe. We have now published the TROs online.
We are now looking at the DP side of these requests. We think that where people want notes about their cars from CEO's pocket notebooks, photos of their car on the yellow lines, all paperwork and letters relating to the fine, notice to owners etc etc it is personal data. Put together it all identifies a specific individual who is having enforcement action taken against them. We have therefore taken the stance that it is a SAR and we charge £10.
Normally it is a simple case of sending out a few pages and not too onerous, some of which they have already received. But now we are coming across cases that are enormous. One requester has 170 unpaid tickets(!) and we are attenmpting to take him to court for non-payment.
I am looking at whether or not we can apply the exemption 7(5) - management forecasting / planning to this information which runs into thouands of pages. I think in this case it would be feasible. But that then opens the door for potentially any PCN info to be considered under this exemption whilst we are in an appeals sitiuation, even if it is just one outstanding ticket.
Do people agree that we would acting within the Act to use this exemption if we refuse release of parking ticket info under a SAR? When they originally get the notice to owner we send out information then for use in their case e.g. link to photo on the web etc. Could we argue a) you've already recently had this info for that which was included so we don't have to send again until reasonable time has elapsed and b) we can exempt other info on the file for 'mangement planning'?
Would appreciate your thoughts, possible arguments etc
Lynn
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