FOI_25-095 Committee member numbers since 2016
Date of response: 29 April 2025
We have now considered your request of 31 March 2025 for the following information:
Unfortunately, I have noticed that historical information about these is not available in your university's annual reports or on the official website.
I would be most grateful if you could kindly provide the following information for each year from 2016 to 2023:
• The number of members of each committee (if applicable): the audit committees, remuneration committees, governance committees, and sustainability committee.
Our response:
| Year | Audit | Remuneration | Governance | Sustainability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | <5 | <5 | <5 | Information not held - s.1(1)(a) |
| 2017 | <5 | <5 | <5 | Information not held - s.1(1)(a) |
| 2018 | <5 | <5 | <5 | Information not held - s.1(1)(a) |
| 2019 | <5 | <5 | <5 | 11 |
| 2020 | <5 | 5 | <5 | 11 |
| 2021 | <5 | 6 | <5 | 11 |
| 2022 | 5 | 6 | <5 | 11 |
| 2023 | 5 | 6 | <5 | 11 |
Information not held - s.1(1)(a), Freedom of Information Act
On this occasion it is not possible to provide all of the requested information. In line with your rights under section 1(1)(a) of the Act to be informed whether information is held, we confirm that the University does not hold any recorded information for the number of committee members for our Sustainability Committee, years 2016, 2017 and 2018. Due to paper copies being destroyed and no digital copies of members lists being held by the University, we confirm this information is not held.
Values marked fewer than five <5: Section 40 (2) exemption explanation:
On this occasion, it is not possible to provide all the requested information. The Act contains several exemptions that allow public authorities to withhold certain information from release. We have applied the following exemption to part of your request.
| Exemption | Reason |
|---|---|
| Section 40 (2), Personal information | Disclosure of some of the requested information would be contrary to the requirements of the UK General Data Protection Regulation |
We can confirm that the University does hold this data and we believe that the requested information, constitutes the personal data of individuals, as defined by Article 4(1) of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, due to the small numbers involved, we consider these details are exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the FOI Act.
We believe that disclosure this data would be contrary to the requirements of Article 5(1)(a) of the GDPR; namely that information must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner. These individuals would have no expectation that this information would be made publicly available, and we have not identified a lawful basis that would allow or require us to disclose this information. To ensure that we do not inadvertently release personal data in this response or in combination with other publicly available data, we have replaced all values between 0 and 4 in relation to the number of individuals with the value ‘<5’.