At the coalface of EIR: investigative journalists win Whitehaven mine case

Rarely has a decision provoked so much ire as the last government’s approval of a new coal mine in Whitehaven in Cumbria. And not just from the usual green suspects: lesser-known eco-warriors the CBI thought it was a terrible idea, as did poor old Alok Sharma (remember him?), a member of the self-same government – perhaps because it fell to him to defend this lunacy to a sceptical world, while hosting the COP 26 climate change summit in Glasgow in 2021.

The decision was, inevitably, challenged in court, and one of the judicial review claimants sought disclosure of the ministerial submission – a briefing from civil servants to Secretary of State prior to the approval decision. Disclosure was refused in the litigation – an important part of the context in this EIR case, about a request for the same information.

The FTT has now granted the appeal against the Commissioner’s decision that the submission could be withheld under reg. 12(4)(e) EIR (Amin v IC [2025] UKFTT 221 (GRC)).

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The Court of Appeal has just handed down judgment in Dept for Business and Trade v IC and Montague [2023] EWCA Civ 1378, confirming that ‘aggregation’ of public interests for exemptions under FOIA is permissible. This, I promise you, is much more exciting than that opening line implies. 

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If you search online for “how to win at TikTok”, you’ll soon land on the 7 second theory: the most successful TikTok videos are limited to 7 seconds. The idea being that users will happily grant you 7 second of fame before swiping onto the next video. However, the same logic does not hold as a winning strategy for representative litigation (a kind of opt-in class action) in the data protection sphere. The most recent such representative claim, against a variety of TikTok companies, has been discontinued by the Claimant. It had, by lawyers’ standards, an analogously short lifecycle on our screens but with notably less success.

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The Court of Justice recently gave guidance on the “internal communications” exception in the Environmental Information Directive 2003/4/EC. It gave its views on the principle that exceptions should be interpreted restrictively and the relevance of the Aarhus Convention Implementation Guide (tl;dr – internal is the opposite of external, to be a communication information has to be shared, there is no time limit on the exception, and neither the principle nor the Guide makes any difference to the outcome in the end).

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