A copy withheld in full because it concerned other people too

What happened

The authority expressed serious criticism of a law firm's handling of an access request under Article 15(3), and ordered it to decide whether the conditions for handing over a copy were met and to tell the requester whether the copy was granted or refused. The firm had answered the Article 15(1) information within a fortnight but declined the copy outright, on the view that disclosure at that point could hinder an investigation it was carrying out for a public authority, and because the material also concerned third parties; it later put the material to the person at an interview and let them comment on it without giving them a copy. The authority held that the national exemption turns on decisive regard for private or public interests, that the weighing is done for each item of information separately, so that where such regard reaches only part of the material the rest must still be disclosed, and that there is no power to exempt a whole kind of processing from the right of access. It held that the refusal could not be sustained within the national exemption once the interview stage had passed, and that the presence of third party data called for item by item redaction rather than refusal of the whole.