The mystery person who tried to get Paul Dennis's emails from UEA has been spurned by the university again.
In the wake of his last jilting, he appealed the university's decision that the data was "not held" under the terms of the FOI Act, asking them to reconsider the decision under EIR - readers may remember that this was the approach I suggested in my earlier post on the subject.
Almost inevitably, Acton et al. have said no, with the reasoning being as follows:
The University has a regular backup regime for email which is to tape. This backup is for the purposes of disaster recovery and is not provided as a service for the retrieval of erroneously deleted information. The ICO provides some guidance on the status of such backups and I do not believe that it is necessary for us to search these for the information you have requested and therefore, I agree with our original assessment that we do not hold the requested information and s.1(1)(a) applies. The correspondence of the individuals that you have named could indeed be environmental information and subject to the Environmental Information Regulations. Having determined that we do not hold the information I can confirm that when considered under the Environmental Information Regulations that Reg.12(4)(a) (Information not held) applies.
The guidance referred to is this document.
Now this strikes me as a bit naughty of the university. The ICO's guidance is based on a legal case based around the FOI Act, not EIR. It is far from clear that the circumstances in which information is held for FOI purposes are the same as those for EIR.
More on this subject in the course of the next week or so. If the mysterious M. Tuppen can hold on, I'll explain how he needs to put his appeal to the Information Commissioner.