You don’t have to only send a Freedom of Information request once.
Repeating your requests is a great way to track progress or otherwise. The Police Oracle study looking at officers off due to mental health issues relies on FOI for information and has been running for 11 years.
Plenty of requests asked about dog attacks before the XL bully ban came in, following up helps to show what, if anything, has changed since.
Library closure
Freedom of Information requests sent to every library authority in the UK and Arts Council England data show the country has lost one in 20 libraries since 2016, either by closing them completely or moving them over to volunteer-run groups.
About 950, a third of those remaining, have had their hours reduced and at least three councils have at least halved their provision since 2016.
The poorest areas were around four times more likely to lose a local venue than the richest when permanent closures were mapped to the government’s Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) – a system which ranks areas according to income, living conditions and other poverty measures.
Police time off
A record 14,508 officers were signed off with poor mental health in the past year, as the increased strain of the job pushes rank and file officers over the edge. The figure has risen 9% on the previous year and has rocketed by an astonishing 130% since the first survey was conducted 11 years ago.
The Police Oracle study found record numbers of officers have been signed off for stress, depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the past 12 months. Of the 43 forces that provided figures both this year and last year – via a Freedom of Information Act request – researchers found 31 had an increased number of officers being signed off for mental health reasons.
Police overtime
A police officer was paid almost £45,000 in overtime last year as force chiefs struggled to plug gaps in services to the public.
Figures released under freedom of information requests show 10 Police Scotland officers received £17,000 and more in payments in the last financial year, with the £44,308 paid to the unnamed officer effectively doubling his annual salary.
The second highest overtime payment was £24,985 followed by £24,905. Some £25.3m was paid to cops in overtime in 2023/24 and a further £3.4m to civilian staff – a total of almost £30million.
Overworked
The Probation Service has been working over capacity in every month since January 2023.
The data, which covers the period up to June 2024 and was obtained via a freedom of information request, shows that the average probation officer has the equivalent of six days’ work to complete in a five-day working week.
Dog attacks
Dog attacks have continued to rise despite a ban on the XL bully breed, exclusive figures obtained by The Independent reveal. Under a change to the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 last year, on 1 February it became illegal to own an XL bully without a certificate of exemption.
In the five months since 1 February there were 6,392 attacks recorded by police in England and Wales, up from 5,888 in the same period in 2023. The data came from 27 police forces which responded to a freedom of information request.
Tube disruption
Data obtained via a Freedom of Information request shows the out of service rate across the London Underground, which measures the percentage of timetabled trains that are unavailable, rose from 0.85 to 2.3 per cent between 2014 and 2024.
The issues are most pronounced on the Bakerloo, Jubilee and Central Lines, which have grappled with disruption caused by train shortages and a lack of investment in upgrades to ageing rolling stock.
The Jubilee Line ranks worst as of this year at 6.39 per cent, followed closely by the Central and Bakerloo Lines, at 5.85 and 4.26 per cent respectively.
Art collection
Birmingham City Council owns an artwork collection valued at almost half a billion pounds, a BBC investigation has discovered. But none will be sold off to help tackle the financial challenges at the council which declared it was effectively bankrupt last year.
Having initially refused to supply the value of the publicly owned art collection to the BBC, the Information Commissioner’s Office ordered the council to reveal the £451m value under the Freedom of Information Act.
The scale of the council-owned art collection was also revealed and included 1,430 paintings, 560 sculptures and 25,924 works on paper as of January. But just 1% of the artwork, 329 pieces, was on display at that time.
Translation fail
It’s not just the Welsh struggling to understand mis-translated signs.
The Scottish Daily Express can reveal Transport Scotland and its operating company BEAR Scotland have installed a number of road signs which has misspelled names. In correspondence received through freedom of information legislation, annoyed Gaelic speakers have got in touch with the transport quango to detail their disappointment.
One traveller got in touch to say that the sign for Crianlarich in Gaelic is “catastrophically wrong” and was promised that it would be fixed, with two letter on the sign being wrong.
Correspondence also showed that in 2023 a Transport Scotland employee pleaded with their colleagues to double and triple check sign spellings were right after a spate of mistakes. They wrote: “Please send PDF proofs of any signs before they are printed to avoid typos.
“There have been a handful of signs appearing across Scotland with typos which are in particular related to the way Microsoft uses the apostrophe key these days that we need to watch out for.”
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