FOI 14-24: Visits to Parliament Buildings from Mr. Jamie Bryson

Information Standards Freedom of Information Response

Our Ref: FoI 14-24

7 March 2024

Freedom of Information Act 2000

I am writing to confirm that the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission (Assembly Commission) has processed your request dated 22 February 2024 in line with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). In this request, which I have numbered and ordered for ease of reference, you asked for the following information:

(i) With reference to Parliament Buildings, please can you supply details of how many times between 01/06/2023 - 10/02/2024 Mr. Jamie Bryson, date of birth January 1990, signed in as a visitor?

(ii) Further to the above question, what Members of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly, if any, sponsored or authorized the visits of Mr. Bryson during this period?

Our response

Requests (i & ii)

Parliament Buildings, is open to the public and it is not necessary for anyone to authorise a person to visit Parliament Buildings.

The Assembly Commission holds information on the number of times Mr Bryson has signed into Parliament Buildings in the period you specify.

The Assembly Commission considers this information to be exempt from disclosure under section 40(2) of the FOIA. Information is exempt information under this section if constitutes personal data, the person requesting the information is not the data subject, and one or more of the conditions set out at sections 40(3A) - (4A) of the FOIA is satisfied.  

The information you have sought is ‘information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person’ and is thus personal data for the purposes of the United Kingdom Data Protection Regulation (UKGDPR). [1]

The Assembly Commission considers the condition set out at section 40(3A)(a) condition is satisfied.  This condition requires that disclosure of the personal data to you (and through you to the public at large) would contravene one or more of the data protection principles.  The data protection principles are set out at Article 5 of the UKGDPR.

The first data protection principle is that personal data must be processed lawfully, fairly, and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject. Article 6 UKGDPR sets out the conditions under which processing of personal data is generally lawful for the purposes of the first principle.  There are six such conditions. 

The Assembly Commission does not consider that any condition is met in this case.  Accordingly, the Assembly Commission cannot lawfully disclose the number of times Mr Bryson has visited Parliament Buildings in the period you have specified.

Further information

You have the right to request an internal review of this decision by the Assembly Commission and if you wish to do so, please write to me at the above address. If after such an internal review you are still unhappy with the response, you may appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF which will undertake an independent review. 

The Assembly Commission may publish details of your FOI request and its official response within the organisational disclosure log. The request will be completely anonymised and you will not be identified in any way. This is to meet the requirements as laid out by in the agreed publication scheme with the Information Commissioners’ Office. 

Yours sincerely

Data Protection and Governance Officer