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Annex - Exemptions that apply and reasoning

Exemption (or EIR exception) - please paste relevant section below

s.40 Personal Information

(1) Any information to which a request for information relates is exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject.

(2) Any information to which a request for information relates is also exempt information if -

(b) either the first or the second condition below is satisfied.

(3) The first condition is -

  1. in a case where the information falls within any of the paragraphs (a) to (d) of the definition of “data” in section 1(1) of the Data Protection Act 1998, that the disclosure of the information to a member of the public otherwise than under this Act would contravene -

i. any of the data protection principles

Information this applies to

The name of the GLA employee who asked to attend the course; the name of their manager (since this could be used to identify the individual concerned); the names of staff in the Learning and Development team in Human Resources since those staff are relatively junior.

How the exemption applies to this information

s.40 Personal Information

This information constitutes personal data which is defined by s.1(1) of the Data Protection Act 1998 to mean data which relates to a living individual who can be identified from that data.

It is considered that disclosure of this information would contravene the first data protection principle which states that “Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully and, in particular, shall not be processed unless—

(a) at least one of the conditions in Schedule 2 is met, and

  1. in the case of sensitive personal data, at least one of the conditions in Schedule 3 is also met.”

It is considered that none of the conditions to allow the processing of the information apply in this case as the subjects have not consented to the use of their data for an alternative purpose (namely disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act). It is therefore considered that this would not be a fair and lawful use of the data.