FI15529
Request
A list of all social housing properties owned by your Council that have been sold within the last 36 months.
For each property sold, please provide:
The address of the property (separated into the number of the property, the road its on and its full postcode) The date of the sale The type of property (e.g., house or flat - please use H for house and F for flat) The price it was sold for and the dicount given on the sale (not as a percentage but as a quanity of GBP) Whether it was sold through Right to Buy or via another process (put a Y in the coloum for yes and N for no)
Response
The information you have sought is attached. However, the full address is considered personal data and therefore exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act. The full address can be categorised as personal data because someone who is motivated to do so could apply their local knowledge and employ investigative techniques to identify specific individuals from those postcodes. In addition, in circumstances where only a small number of properties are included within a postcode, individual properties may be identified by revealing the full postcode together with the information already provided in the attached document.
In respect of the sale price and discount offered, the Council the individuals concerned are likely to have a strong expectation of privacy relating to the requested information. HM Land Registry states that information on Right to Buy sales is excluded from its Price Paid Dataset, which is the main source of property sales information in the public domain. The information would also reveal the valuation figure of each property, and the tenant discount subsequently agreed between individual purchasers and the Council. The Commissioner considers that the data subjects are entitled to regard such information as confidential, and to expect to retain control over who may have access to it. Therefore, the Council has determined that the legitimate interests in disclosure are not strong enough to outweigh the data subjects’ fundamental rights and freedoms. The Council considers that there is no basis to disclose the requested information, and that to do so would be in breach of data protection principle (a) and this information has been withheld from our response under Section 40(2) of the Act.
In taking this decision, the Council has relied on a decision taken by the Information Commissioner on a similar matter. The ICO decision can be found here: https://ico.org.uk/media/action-weve-taken/decision-notices/2023/4024398/ic-198806-p6k5.pdf.
Attachments
Attachment