AIE: Information related to any instructions / guidance / clarification given to administrative staff and Agriculture Appeals Officers working on behalf of the FAC, on the acceptance / refusal of appeals against forestry licences. This includes general information and information specific to individual licences…”
Background
The FAC has provided no detailed or specific reasoning for its reliance on article 9(2)(a) of the AIE Regulations. Despite estimating that examining 555 appeal files in order to extract the information sought by the appellant would take four months, the FAC did not explain how it reached this conclusion or why this would impose an unreasonable level of work on the FAC in processing the request. As set out above, the burden in on the public authority to demonstrate the unreasonableness of the task entailed by the request, and this requires the public authority to provide a satisfactory level of detail regarding the time it would take to process the request. This detail should include how many staff members would be required, what steps would be involved in answering the request and how much time would be spent on each
of these tasks.
I find it difficult to understand how the appellant could have successfully narrowed the actual subject matter or description of the environmental information further, without any specific guidance from the FAC.
The FAC has not indicated whether it has written procedures in place for the processing of submitted forestry licence appeals
I note in its brief submissions to this Office, wherein the FAC commented that “much of [the information sought by the appellant] may not even be environmental information”. It did not provide any reasons to support this view and in this regard, I would remind the FAC that whether information is “environmental information” is one of the threshold issues to be considered when processing an AIE request.
Note: Paragraphs 22, 25 and 29 in OCEI decision