ICO orders council to publish flood risk report

The Information Commissioner’s Office has rejected a council’s claim that disclosure of a flood risk report would cause panic among the general public.

ICO principal policy adviser Gerrad Tracey has now ordered the London Borough of Hillingdon to disclose by 23 June an assessment of flood risk at Ruislip Lido, a recreational lake.

A member of the public asked for the report on flood risk but the council refused to release it, citing an exemption because it was incomplete.

The council told the complainant the report was a scoping note commissioned to identify work required in carrying out a flood risk assessment, and a final report would be received from consulting engineers and published once it had been sent to the Environment Agency.

“The commissioner expressed to the council that he was not persuaded that the scoping note could be said to be incomplete material simply because it identified the need for further work,” the ICO decision notice said.

But Hillingdon argued that disclosure of the scoping note alone would leave the public without all the relevant information and might “create a misleading impression of the council’s intentions”. Disclosure could also, it said, “result in unwarranted confusion and panic amongst members of the public, especially those who may be affected by any possible flood risk [and] the council would have to set aside already sparse resources in order to deal with public enquiries and it would not be able to handle these enquiries properly without the completed assessment from the Environment Agency”.

The commissioner said he was “not persuaded that significant weight should be attached to the council’s fears that disclosure would cause undue anxiety, panic and resource intensive activity”. Nor did he believe that Hillingdon would receive an unreasonable number of enquiries with which it would be unable to cope.

“Overall, the commissioner does not accept the position assumed by the council throughout his investigation that there was little or no value in the disclosure of the scoping note prior to the Environment Agency’s assessment,” the notice said. “The scoping note concerns plans being considered by the council for major development works in the area and there is therefore a strong public interest in disclosure.”