The Court of Appeal has upheld the High Court's decision that the Home Office was entitled to rely on section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which exempts information from disclosure if its disclosure is prohibited by another enactment, in relation to a request for information on licences under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, because section 24 of the Act (section 24) applied (see Legal update, High Court allows Home Office FOIA appeal in animal testing licences case). Section 24 provides that a person is guilty of an offence if they disclose, other than for the purposes of the Act, information obtained in exercising functions under the Act which they knew or had reasonable grounds for believing had been "given in confidence". The requestor argued that section 24 only applied to information protected under the law of confidence applying the three-step test in Coco v Clark [1969] RPC 41. The Court of Appeal disagreed. It said section 24 was couched in subjective terms, raising the simple question of whether the person in possession of the information knew or had reasonable grounds to believe the information had been given in confidence. There was nothing in the statutory language justifying the importation of an objective test from the law of confidentiality.

Case: British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection v (1) Home Office (2) Information Commissioner, [2008] EWCA Civ 870, 30 July 2008.