EIR - GLA meetings with Richmond Council on affordable housing [Nov 2022]

Your request

Can I have a copy of all correspondence and meeting minutes relating to Richmond Council regarding the building of affordable housing in London over the past five years?

Both to the GLA housing team and the GLA planning department over the formulation of the new Richmond Local Plan.

I am keen to see why they have not been building more and allowing numerous developments to have no affordable housing.

Can I see the correspondence and minutes in relation to Richmond Borough's cooperation with other neighbouring local authorities and the GLA to meet its unmet housing need elsewhere?

Has the GLA made its views known to Richmond Council on its housing building needs
and if so, can I have a copy, please?

Our response

Your request in full falls under the exception to disclose because it is considered to be
‘manifestly unreasonable’ under regulation 12(4)(b) of the Environmental Information
Regulation (EIR). This provision allows public authorities to refuse requests which are obviously or clearly unreasonable or when the estimated cost of compliance is too great. In reaching this decision we have considered the views of the Upper (Information Rights) Tribunal in ‘Craven v IC & DECCC [2012] UKUT442 (AAC)’ in respect of the EIR exception under regulation 12(4)(b), the formal guidance issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), along with Decision Notices regarding this EIR exception, such as FS505859262, amongst others, which all acknowledge that public authorities may use the fees regulations as the basis of considering the cost and time of complying with a request.

Your request for 'all correspondence relating to Richmond Council regarding the building of
affordable housing in London over the past five years', is particularly broad. Various members of staff in our Housing and Land Directorate are likely to hold information which would fall within scope of your request.

The ICO have provided guidance to members of the public on submitting ‘catch-all’ requests for information to help highlight the potential problems in submitting broad requests that could either be considered to be open-ended or involve large quantities of information.

Information request dos and don’ts:

Send ‘catch-all’ requests for information (such as ‘please provide me with everything you hold about ‘x’) when you aren’t sure what specific documents to ask for.

In this instance, we have decided this request falls within the parameters of regulation 12(4)(b) and is manifestly unreasonable because of the considerable amount of time that would be required to collate and review the information. Correspondence by nature tends to be hybrid and often contains discussions on many different topics; it is the time it will take officers to read through emails to extract the specific information you are seeking that unfortunately makes complying with this request so time consuming, this would place an unacceptable burden on their limited resources and constitute an unreasonable distraction from normal work.

A public authority can only withhold information if the public interest in maintaining the
exception outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information. We are mindful of the
general public interest in transparency and accountability, and of the presumption in favour of disclosure and to read exceptions restrictively.

The time and resources required to review this information would be unreasonable given the broad scope of the request for ‘all emails’ within the specified timeframe. Similarly, a large volume of information caught by this request is likely to be administrative in nature.

Where this information might be suitable for release under the EIR, the time and resources required to review this information, given it cannot be easily separated from information out of scope of your request, would also be unreasonable given the limited benefit to the public debate on this matter.

On balance therefore, it is our view that the public interest in maintaining the exception in regulation 12(4)(b) outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

When refusing a request for environmental information under regulation 12(4)(b) on the
grounds of cost, public authorities are required to provide advice and assistance and explaining how a request may be refined. However, your current request is particularly broad and it is not clear what specific type of information you are most interested in. You may wish to consider reducing the scope of your request by identifying particular themes or subjects for the correspondence in which you are most interested in, or by identifying specific correspondents by which we could refine our searches.

You may also wish to refer to the following guidance from the ICO:

Manifestly unreasonable requests

ICO Decision Notice: 25 November 2015

How to access information from a public authority

In making this decision, we have taken account of the fact that we are able to provide you with some information within scope of your request which can be more readily identified.

Since December 2021, we have held joint quarterly meetings with Richmond and Wandsworth (given their shared services).

We have attached the relevant parts of these meeting minutes which fall within scope of your request and where available, we have also attached relevant parts of meeting minutes prior to December 2021.

GLA officers have also met with Richmond officers separately regarding Twickenham Riverside. Discussions are ongoing and as such we are not able to provide further information at this stage. In addition, Richmond have secured GLA funding for their property acquisitions programme with Richmond Housing Partnership and for projects through the Rough Sleepers Accommodation Programme. Given the nature of these schemes and several teams involved, we are not able to provide correspondence in relation to this.

Please also find attached our response to a recent Affordable Housing Supplementary Planning Document consultation conducted by Richmond in our response to the consultation regarding the borough’s emerging Local Plan in 2020. We also responded to a consultation Richmond conducted for their emerging Local Plan in January.

If you have any further questions relating to this matter, please contact us, quoting the
reference MGLA241022-1835.