The First-tier Tribunal has dismissed an appeal against an Information Commissioner decision that a council's correspondence with a local newspaper about a resident was the resident's own personal data, but has criticised the Commissioner for reaching that decision without seeing the withheld information or engaging with the council, an approach it said caused months of delay and unnecessary cost.
Judge Maton, sitting with members Chafer and Taylor in Peter Hope v Information Commissioner [2026] UKFTT 1307 (GRC), found no error of law in decision notice IC-384497-S5J0 of 13 November 2025, which held that Buckinghamshire Council was entitled to withhold the material under regulation 5(3) of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR).
Hope has been in dispute with the council and its predecessor since 2016 over flooding to his garden, which he attributes to the nearby Weston Grove housing development and to the developer's failure to meet planning and contractual obligations. In January 2024 he approached the Bucks Herald, and in April 2024 a journalist from the paper contacted the council's press office about an email Hope had sent to chief executive Rachael Shimmin and six members of the council.
No story has been published. On 25 October 2024 Hope requested all correspondence between the journalist and the press office or other members of the council about that enquiry, including internal exchanges.
The council's handling of the request shifted repeatedly. It first refused under section 40(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on the basis that the material was Hope's own personal data, treated the request as a subject access request and supplied a "summary of events".
When challenged it said the request should have been handled under the EIR and refused under regulations 5(3) and 13(5), which the tribunal assumed was intended as a reference to regulation 13(5A), stating that it could neither confirm nor deny whether it held the information but offering little reasoning. The internal review of 15 April 2025 upheld that position and for the first time referred to the journalist's personal data.
The Commissioner found that the requested information was Hope's personal data and therefore fell outside the EIR by virtue of regulation 5(3), which disapplies the duty to make information available to the extent that it is personal data of which the applicant is the data subject. The notice did not go on to consider regulation 13(5).
The tribunal directed the council, which declined to be joined as a party, to produce the withheld material. It made a rule 14 order preventing disclosure to Hope and the Commissioner provided him with a gist.
The closed material comprised 12 pages of emails: the journalist's initial enquiry, internal discussion between officers about how to respond, and the approved quotation sent to the paper, which the journalist had passed to Hope in December 2024. The tribunal found nothing in the correspondence suggesting any attempt by the council to influence the paper's decision on whether to publish.
Personal data under the EIR carries the meaning in the Data Protection Act 2018, information relating to an identified or identifiable living individual. Applying Farrand v Information Commissioner [2014] UKUT 0310 (AAC), the tribunal noted that an individual need not be identifiable from every part of the information for it to relate to them when read in context.
The emails documented how the council should respond to an enquiry about Hope, his correspondence and the circumstances behind it, and Hope had himself accepted in his grounds that he was identifiable from the exchange.
The information was therefore his personal data and within regulation 5(3). Any passages not relating to those matters would fall outside the scope of the request in any event. Having reached that conclusion, the Commissioner had not erred in declining to consider regulation 13(5).
The tribunal treated Hope's wider complaints about the council's conduct and his suspicion that his personal data had been unlawfully passed to the newspaper as outside the scope of an appeal under section 58, which is confined to whether the decision notice was in accordance with the law.
Closing its reasons, the tribunal said it was "remarkable" that the Commissioner had felt able to decide the matter without sight of the requested information or any engagement with the council to understand the background, and that this approach had resulted in several months of delay in determining the appeal and unnecessary cost for the parties and the tribunal.
