Another week, another public body told to get its Freedom of Information efforts up to scratch.
A couple of weeks ago Bristol Council failed to overturn an Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) order to get FOI request answered on time. The ICO has now issued an enforcement notice to Liverpool Council (the main takeaway is that complaining about poor performance works).
For January to July 2025, 56% of FOI requests to the council were dealt with within 20 working days. The enforcement notice says the council had a backlog of 75 overdue requests. The Liverpool Echo is reporting that’s since risen to 100 overdue requests.
When Liverpool Council was given a practice recommendation telling it to sort out it’s timeliness issues in July 2023, 63% of requests were being answered in 20 working days and 99 requests were overdue. So, there’s not been much improvement.
The practice recommendation was made after the ICO received 46 complaints about Liverpool Council in just over a year.
Liverpool Council now needs to clear the backlog of 75 requests by January 8 next year. It also needs to develop and publish an action plan in the next 30 days to ensure a consistent 90% response rate in the future.
Meanwhile in Australia, the Government has introduced a bill to amend the FOI Act. Changes include introducing fees for certain applications (potentially A$30 to $58 per application), a ban on anonymous FOI requests and stronger powers to deter vexatious, abusive and frivolous requests.
Councillor’s criminal records
Three councillors on West Northamptonshire Council (WNC) have been issued positive criminal records checks in the last 18 months.
According to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the authority has requested 141 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks on its members since April 2024. The checks determine if an individual has any past criminal convictions, cautions, reprimands, warnings or information held by police forces.
WNC has revealed that two positive disclosure certificates, which are given when an individual’s record flags up relevant content or offences, were issued in 2024/25 and another one was issued in 2025/26. Only one positive check relates to an existing councillor in post after the May elections.
Due to a strict confidentiality clause in the DBS policy, WNC cannot name the members that the three positive disclosure certificates relate to. It is an offence under the Police Act 1997 to pass disclosure information to unauthorised persons and failure to maintain confidentiality could result in disciplinary action.
Debt write-offs
Debts of nearly £4m for social care in Kent have been written off in the past five years, according to new figures.
The cost of bad debts to Kent County Council (KCC) has been revealed in a disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
Write-offs hit a peak in 2022-23 at £1.03m, dropping to £969,000 in the 2023-24 period. But by 2024-25, those bad debts had dropped to just over £660,000, still higher than the £553,000 figure five years previously.
Second jobs
At least 288 local authority employees have been caught working second full-time jobs since 2020, often without informing their employer, according to new findings from Witan Solicitors.
The figures, obtained through Freedom of Information requests to more than 300 councils in England, show that 46 staff were either dismissed or formally disciplined after being discovered to have taken on additional full-time roles.
So-called “overemployment” is a growing trend on platforms such as TikTok and Reddit, where users share tips on how to juggle multiple jobs undetected. Common tactics include the use of “mouse jigglers” to simulate activity and strategies for avoiding documentation that could attract attention.
Housing repairs
Social housing tenants have to wait an average of 52 days for heating and hot water repairs in bathrooms, according to research by the Dorset company Drench.
Freedom of information requests submitted by the bathroom retailer found these repairs took the second longest time to resolve, after damp and mould issues, which averaged 82 days.
After requesting the information from every local authority in the UK for repairs and complaints throughout 2024, responses from 80 councils showed the average time for any bathroom repair was 37 days.
Weight loss jabs
The rollout of Mounjaro was announced by NHS England with much fanfare last year but an investigation by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has shown the jabs are being rationed. Health authorities calculated 3.4 million people could benefit from the drug so the NHS agreed the injections would be rolled out in phases over a 12-year period.
Some 220,000 patients were supposed to be prescribed it in the first three years but analysis suggests funding for year one clearly only covers 10% of the doses needed so far.
But the BMJ says few integrated care boards (ICBs) have been allocated enough funding from NHS England for these patients. Responses to its Freedom of Information requests showed only nine of 42 regional boards had the funding needed to cover at least 70% of their eligible patients.
A total of 40 of the 42 ICBs responded to the BMJ’s request.
Four ICBs told the BMJ the NHS funding they had received covered just 25% or less of their eligible patients, with Coventry and Warwickshire faring the worst. That ICB told the BMJ it had received funding to cover just 376 patients, despite identifying 1,795 eligible patients in the first year of rollout.
Phone thefts
Hundreds of phones thefts across Cambridgeshire are going unsolved, shocking new figures have revealed.
According to exclusively obtained Freedom of Information data, more than half of reported phone thefts were closed without a conviction.
The figures, supplied by Cambridgeshire Police, cover April 2023 to March 2025, reveal just 47 cases resulted in a “positive outcome”.
The remaining 1,588 reports received by officers were recorded by police as a “negative outcome”, with no further action being taken.
Disabled parking fines
New data has revealed that users of Ilkley’s South Hawksworth Street Car Park received the most fines in the Bradford district for parking in disabled bays without a valid Blue Badge.
The figures, obtained via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Evans Halshaw, show that 23,640 fines were issued by Bradford Council between 2019 and 2024 for misuse of disabled parking spaces.
A location breakdown of offences was also provided, with the highest number recorded at Ilkley’s main car park. The top 5 locations and fines are:
- South Hawksworth Street Car Park – 296 fines
- Crown Court Car Park – 287 fines
- Keighley Leisure Centre – 248 fines
- Market Place Car Park – 200 fines
- Sedbergh Car Park – 159 fines
Illegal vapes
No traders in Hertfordshire have yet been issued with new £200 fines for the sale of disposable vapes, according to the latest information released by the county council.
A national ban on the sale of single-use vapes came into force on June 1. Any trader caught selling them faces a £200 fine, alongside the seizure of the products.
A response issued by the county council – following a Freedom of Information request – confirms that the county council has not yet issued a £200 fine for the sale of single-use vapes, under the new legislation.
Noisy students
Thousands of noise complaints have been made against Oxford Brookes university students in the last five years, new data reveals.
Oxford Brookes University recorded the highest number of noise complaints of all universities between 2020-2025, with 5,307 noise complaints, equivalent to more than 80 complaints per month, a Freedom of Information request submitted by MattressNextDay has revealed.
Just 199 of these noise complaints led to student disciplinary action in these years, meaning only 3.75 per cent of noise complaints led to punishment.
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