Your response, and all other responses to public consultation, may be disclosed on request. Commissioners can only refuse to disclose information in exceptional circumstances. Before you submit your response, please read the paragraphs below on the confidentiality of consultation exercises – these will give you guidance on the legal position about any information given by you in response to this exercise.

The Freedom of Information Act gives the public a right of access to any information held by a public authority, in this case the Commissioners. This right of access to information includes information provided in response to a consultation. Commissioners cannot automatically consider as confidential information supplied to them in response to a consultation exercise. Commissioners do, however, have responsibility to decide whether any information provided by you in response to this consultation, including information about your identity, should be made public or be treated as confidential.

This means that information provided by you in response to this consultation is unlikely to be treated as confidential, except in very particular circumstances. The Lord Chancellor’s Code of Practice on the Freedom of Information Act provides that:

• Commissioners should only accept information from third parties in confidence if it is necessary to obtain that information in connection with the exercise of any of their functions and it would not otherwise be provided;
• Commissioners should not agree to hold information received from third parties in confidence which is not confidential in nature; and
• acceptance by Commissioners of confidentiality provisions must be for good reasons, capable of being justified to the Information Commissioner.

For further information about the confidentiality of responses, you may wish to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office or visit www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk

For further information about this particular consultation exercise, please contact Iris Lovell in the Commissioners’ Secretariat – full contact details are provided on Page 2 of this document.