Panel members on the Water Treatment Tender Board (FOI)

​Request

I refer to a response to a previous Freedom of Information request published at the following link:

Water treatment facility tender process (FOI)

Who are the 10 panel members referred to in the previous response?

Response

The job titles of the 10 panel members were:

• Principal Engineer

• Finance Director (DFI)

• Project Director Waste Strategy

• Senior Engineer

• Category Manager (Procurement)

• Principal Engineer at Sweco UK Limited

• Senior Electrical Engineer

• CBS Eng. Consultants Ltd

• Project Engineer

• Operations Manager at Sweco UK Limited

When deciding whether to release the names of individual staff members it is necessary to take into account a number of factors such as

• whether disclosure is linked to other sensitive personal information

• the reasonable expectation of the employee for their name to be released into the public domain

• whether there is a legitimate public interest in the release

• the rights and freedoms of the employee

• the potential consequences of disclosure.

In this instance we do not believe that there is a wider legitimate public interest in releasing the names of these individual staff members, rather the release would only serve to satisfy a single requester.

Furthermore none of the staff that made up the panel are in public facing roles where regular contact with the general public or media is part of their job role and as such there is no reasonable expectation from any of these individuals that their names would be released into the public domain.

Taking this into consideration, along with the department’s responsibility to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals who are merely carrying out their work duties, we conclude that these factors outweigh any argument in favour of release.

Article applied

Article 25 - Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

(3) In determining for the purposes of this Article whether the lawfulness principle in Article 8(1)(a) of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 would be contravened by the disclosure of information, paragraph 5(1) of Schedule 2 to that Law (legitimate interests) is to be read as if sub-paragraph (b) (which disapplies the provision where the controller is a public authority) were omitted.