I love a Freedom of Information request. I also love not sending an FOI request.
As a data journalist, sometimes it’s easier to go digging through published data for the story rather than using FOI, especially if what you’d be asking for is just what would be published anyway (public bodies are well within their rights to refuse requests when you could just get the information elsewhere).
So here’s some FOI stories that could have been done in a similar way using available data (and where to find the available data).
Want some more ideas for datasets you can mine for stories now (rather than waiting 20 working days for an answer)? Here’s seven more to take a look at.
Children named as suspects in North Wales Police investigations
Freedom of Information data obtained by The Leader from North Wales Police details the number of suspects in cases from 2020, 2021 and 2022 who fall below the age of criminal responsibility (10 years of age). In total, there were 704 such suspects, with the annual total increasing year on year: from 205 in 2020 to 230 the year after, then 269 in 2022.
You can use the police recorded crime and outcomes open data tables to get some interesting data looking at the number of crimes where prosecutions were prevented because the suspect was under age. Another one to look at is cases that have stalled because either the suspect or victims/witnesses are dead or ill.
Advice to families as Wrexham Council owed £10m in tax
Freedom of Information data obtained by the Leader confirmed that as of April 1 this year, the total net debt council tax owed to the authority for all financial years is £10,771,888.80.
While you might need FOI to get the most up to date data, councils publish information about their council tax arrears each year – you can find England data in Table 9 here and Wales data on StatsWales.
Thousands of Coventry kids regularly missed school, shock new research shows
More than 6,000 Coventry schoolkids were classed as ‘persistently absent’ in alarming new research. The shock findings come from online school Minerva’s Virtual Academy. The Academy says Coventry City Council has raked in over £20,000 in fines for non-attendance, over the last three years after submitting Freedom of Information requests to the organisation.
There’s several datasets you could look into for stories covering issues around absences in schools.
Depending on how granular you want your data, you get this data in almost real time for England (the Department for Education started publishing regular updates during the pandemic). This data covers local authority, regional and national level absence rates.
If you want to look at absence rates at school level, the figures are published a bit less regularly – by term rather than weekly. Data on parent’s being fined for their children missing school is also published annually.
Labour blames ‘shoplifter’s charter’ for rising store thefts
Meanwhile, the Labour Party said figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed charges for shoplifting had fallen by around 16% since 2018.
FOI is a great tool for political parties looking to find stories to highlight their rivals’ failings. But Labour possibly could have avoided having to use it as the figures on crime outcomes (especially for the year to September 2023) are pretty easy to come by.
If you want outcomes for a particular type of crime, you’ll have to have a look through the open data tables, but this is a really useful dataset for writing crime stories.
More than 1,000 people injured and 19 killed at Greater Manchester pedestrian crossings in the last five years
More than 1,000 people have been hurt and 19 have been killed at pedestrian crossings across Greater Manchester in the past five years, data shows. The shocking figure was discovered thanks to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request made to Greater Manchester Police (GMP) by Admiral Car Insurance.
The Department for Transport publishes very detailed data on road accidents (it’s incident level and it includes location and information about casualties and vehicles and road conditions). It does have a tool you can use to create custom datasets, which potentially makes makes finding what you want even easier.
Dozen of homeless people die in Brighton and Hove
Dozens of homeless people died in Brighton and Hove last year, The Argus can reveal. Drugs, alcohol, cancer and suicide were among the causes of the deaths of 43 people who were sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation in the city during 2022. It said each fatality was verified by a Freedom of Information request, coroner’s report, charity or family member.
This is a slightly trickier one. There is Office for National Statistics data on deaths of homeless people but it may not be consistently updated. There were briefly plans to cancel the publication but it seems that it will continue (although the format might change somewhat).
Greater Manchester council has issued TWO fly-tipping fines in nearly a whole YEAR
Stockport council has only issued TWO fly-tipping fines since last May, a Freedom of Information request has revealed. The eyebrow-raising statistic – bosses expect more than 3,000 fly-tipping reports this municipal year – was revealed by Labour councillor David Meller at a recent full council meeting.
There’s a regular publication of fly-tipping statistics, which includes information on both the number of reports and the number of enforcements, so will definitely cover information about who is and isn’t issuing fines.
Kent doctor reveals colleague denied time off for own wedding as hundreds leave our hospitals
Figures obtained through a series of Freedom of Information requests show the number of doctors leaving Kent hospitals each year since 2018 has leapt 45%. Over the period, the total number of medics across the county has risen by little more than a quarter.
Not sure this one needed a series of FOI requests as you can probably do similar analysis using NHS Digital workforce data. It’s published monthly, broken down by organisation and type of worker and includes information about headcount and turnover.
Data reveals how many Suffolk gun owners had their licences revoked last year
A total of 14 gun owners in Suffolk had their licences revoked last year, new data shows. A Freedom of Information Request by SuffolkLive has revealed that the number of revocations in 2022 was the lowest in five years.
This data is published annually by the Home Office (along with other statistics around firearms licences).
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