FOI 47-24: Information regarding details of correspondence between the NI Assembly and the British Heart Foundation
Information Standards Freedom of Information Response
4 November 2024
Our Ref: FoI 47-24
Freedom of Information Act 2000
I am writing to confirm that the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission (Assembly Commission) has processed your request dated 22 October 2024 in line with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). In your request, you asked:
"Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like to request details of correspondence between the NI Assembly and the British Heart Foundation (BHF).
Please disclose the following for the period from 1 September 2022 to 1 August 2023:
- A copy of all correspondence… sent to and received from the BHF
- A copy of all correspondence… between @mla.niassembly.gov.uk email addresses of Sinn Fein MLAs and the BHF.
- A copy of all correspondence… between @mla.niassembly.gov.uk email addresses of Sinn Fein MLAs and the now defunct BHF email address mcmonaglem@bhf.org.uk."
Our response
Question 1
There was no correspondence between the Assembly or Assembly Commission and the BHF in this period. Accordingly, the Assembly Commission holds no information in relation to this question.
Questions 2 and 3
Section 1(1) of the FOIA entitles a person to make a request for information to a public authority and to be informed in writing by the public authority whether it holds information of the description specified in the request and if that is the case, to have that information communicated, subject to any applicable exemptions. However, in some circumstances, information to which a public authority may have access is not held for the purposes of the FOIA. In particular, section 3(2)(a) of the FOIA states that 'information is held by a public authority if it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person'.
E-mail addresses and online storage facilities are part of the services provided by the Assembly Commission to Members to enable them to discharge their functions.
The Assembly Commission does not consider that information created by Members and stored on these systems is held by the Assembly Commission.
In this regard it may be noted that paragraph 1.10 of the Freedom of Information Code of Practice published by the Cabinet Office states:
'Purely personal, political, constituency, or trade union information, for example, will not be "held" for the purposes of the Act and so will not be relevant for the purposes of the request. Where a public authority holds or stores information solely on behalf of another person or body that material will also not be "held" by that authority for the purposes of the Act'.
As regards electronic information, a leading text notes the following:
'[T]he obvious category of information which an authority holds on behalf of another person is where the other person uses the authority's equipment and/or communication facilities to create, store or communicate information… An employing public authority may be able to access or control in some way the employee's personal emails sent from work, as it can do with any information on its electronic information system, but that does not make the authority the holder of the information in those emails for the purposes of the access regimes'.[1]
The Assembly Commission considers the analysis set out in the two preceding paragraphs to be of equal application where the Assembly Commission makes equipment and communication facilities available to Members for use for political and constituency purposes.
Accordingly, the information specified in questions 2 and 3 is not held by the Assembly Commission for the purposes of the FOIA.
Further Information
You have the right to request an internal review of this decision by the Assembly Commission. If you wish to request such a review, please write to me at the above address. If, after that review, you are dissatisfied with the way in which the Assembly Commission has handled your request for information, you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.
Your request for information and our response may be published in the disclosure log maintained by the Assembly Commission under a publication scheme agreed with the ICO. The request and our response will be anonymised.
Yours sincerely
Data Protection and Governance Officer
[1] Sue Cullen, Freedom of Information in the UK (1st Edn, Sweet and Maxwell, 2019), at 7-040
