Recurrent: Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism

Recurred resolution: R/0192/2023

In exercise of his right of access to public information, an individual filed an application for access addressed to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, to obtain information on the number of incidents, complaints, visits, or similar, raised by the staff of the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office and received in the Ministry’s Occupational Risk Prevention Service, disaggregated by sex and year in the period 2015-2022, and the reason for them.

The requested Ministry ruled that the request was inadmissible on the grounds that it was of a generic nature because it was not reasonably limited; that it could not guarantee that the information it could provide was all that was available; and that the inadmissibility of article 18.1.e) of the Transparency, Access to Public Information and Good Governance Act (LTAIBIG) was concurrent, since collecting the requested information exceeds the reasonable treatment that can be given in the preparation of a response to a request for access. Later, during the complaints procedure before the Council, he adds that this is not public information and that a prior reworking of the response would be necessary, within the meaning of Article 18.1.c) LTAIBG.

The Council considers the complaint by acknowledging, in the first place, the clearly public nature of the information requested, since it is directly related to the content of the functions of the Ministry ' s occupational risk prevention service, on the one hand, and because it is appropriate for the purposes of monitoring and supervising the actions of public officials in the exercise of their functions, on the other.

With regard to the generic nature of the application, the Council understands that, although the initial application may have been successful, the restriction made by the interested party in his claim must be accepted, recalling that the generic or confusing approach to the application is not accommodated in any of the causes of inadmissibility provided for in the Law.

Finally, the Council rules out the concurrence of the grounds of admission invoked. On the one hand, compliance with the double requirement imposed by the jurisprudence to apply the case of article 18.1.e) LTAIBG (request for abuse and lack of justification for the purpose of the law) is not appreciated. On the other hand, the need to redraft the request cannot be argued, since the circumstances required by case law and the Council to give rise to it do not exist; in particular, that the information must be prepared expressly to respond to the request, that it must be used by various sources of information and that the Administration does not have the necessary means to extract and exploit the specific information requested.