The Information Commissioner’s Office has some ideas for cutting back on Freedom of Information requests.
Jump to this week’s FOI stories…
No one seems to have asked them. They’ve apparently just decided to be (un)helpful.
An FOI request has revealed ICO internal communications suggesting a “suite of provisions” focused on reducing the impact of requests on public bodies and the ICO.
Suggestions included:
- Restricting requests to UK residents and foreign residents who have the right to vote in the UK
- Making requesters provide a physical address
- Requiring people to provide ID when making requests
- Requiring people to say a request is an FOI for it to be treated as one
- Letting public bodies mandate a single electronic route for requests (like a web form), possibly with a word limit
- Limit the number of requests per year to individual public bodies (it suggests five)
- Allowing individuals, and not just requests, to be declared vexatious
- Letting public bodies refuse requests where there is little public interest in disclosure. Or let the ICO refuse to investigate complaints about such requests
- When the ICO reaches an opinion on a case in a round robin, allowing it to serve that on other public bodies that have received the same request
- Removing the right of appeal to the First Tier Tribunal (FTT). Appeals against decision notices would only be to the Upper Tier Tribunal (UTT) on a point of law (similar to the procedure in Scotland)
If we’re all good and tighten up our annoying requests, the ICO could see removing or limiting the public interest test extension and making a 20 working day internal review deadline statutory.
Why these aren’t great ideas
As Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information points out: “Several of the proposals would probably have only have a minor impact on request numbers but add to officials’ workload”.
Checking addresses, residency requirements, and IDs “would create an enormous administrative burden and would be unfair and excessive in GDPR terms”, according to Tim Turner on FOI Daily.
George Greenwood, investigative reporter at The Times, said limiting requests per authority would hit narrowly focussed campaign groups hard. He highlights how the Infected Blood campaign relied heavily on FOI to win their campaign for compensation.
Declaring a person, rather than a request, vexatious could amount to a banning them from using the FOI Act. An FTT has previously said, if someone stops sending confusing, overlapping, accusatory requests and actually sends something polite and answerable, they should get a proper response. The system needs to allow for people to learn and grow (even if they’re really annoying right now).
Refusing to deal with requests that are not sufficiently in the public interest could mean no answers on serious matters. Maurice suggests issues such as unfair dismissal or nuisance neighbours could be affected.
The ICO’s brainstorming admits letting public bodies decide on whether something is in the public interest might have problems. It could be “prone to abuse” (you don’t say). There would be issues around setting an objective test/assessment for this (which just sounds like extra work for everyone and kind of defeats the purpose).
Am I the problem?
Making one decision notice apply to multiple public bodies with round robin requests sounds specific. Probably unrelated, I had four decision notices from a batch of complaints about small numbers refusals at the end of April.
This may or may not work as intended. But, from personal experience, the issue isn’t getting several decision notices. It’s having to make endless complaints about the same issues.
If the ICO’s role is to promote good practice, it’s doing a lousy job.
I shouldn’t still be getting small numbers refusals that contain no reference to the exemption relied on and/or where basic maths reveals the small number.
Leicestershire claimed they had to suppress numbers below five because it was good practice in line with ICO/DfE [Department for Education] guidance. The specific guidance they linked to has a foreword from Christopher Graham (two Commissioners ago, left in 2016).
It’s not the current guidance. It’s about three UTT decisions out of date.
If the FOI officers at Leicestershire County Council don’t know this, the ICO is failing. If it would like to get fewer complaints, it might want to spend a bit more time on this and less on coming up with unasked for ways to make FOI requests harder to make.
Not keen on this one either
Another suggestion that feels kind of like a personal attack is making everyone make requests through an online form. I’m not a fan, I’ve complained about public bodies that try to force people to use them, and unlike the ICO, I don’t think it would be to the benefit of requesters to go down this route.
This one is somewhat personal preference but there’s good reasons for wanting to be able to keep correspondence in your own email account. Like when you send lots of requests and lots of complaints. And I’m not sure I trust the permanence of responses held in such online systems.
So why is the ICO doing this?
The freelance transparency crackdown seems to have come at about the same time the UK Government was anonymously briefing about potentially cutting the cost limit for responding to FOI request. It’s not clear if there’s any connection, or it’s just a coincidence.
The ICO has said this was an internal sharing of ideas in response to public bodies telling it they’re getting more requests and the ICO getting more complaints, according to a post from Jon Baines, senior data protection specialist at Mishcon de Reya.
The ICO didn’t respond to his question about whether its role included proposing changes to how the FOI Act works.
As Jon points out, the most concerning aspect here is the lack of transparency. Instead of having an open debate, it, ironically, took an FOI to find out what the ICO had been doing.
Freedom of Information restrictions in action
If you want a warning about the consequences of restricting the right of people to access information through FOI…
The Ontario government pushed through restrictions on FOI. And information is getting harder to get (and the public is less informed as a consequence).
More than 70% of hospitals in the Canadian province are forecasting deficits. The health minister Sylvia Jones told them to come up with three-year plans to balance their budgets. Within those “high risk” moves with service impacts for patients should only be considered if all lower-risk options were exhausted.
The Canadian Press filed an FOI request in November for documents relating to the plans.
The Ministry of Health gave themselves a 90-day extension to turn over the records, until March 10. No response came by that date and requests for updates went unanswered.
In the meantime, a bill to put the records of the premier, cabinet ministers and their staff outside of the reach of FOI became law. That law is retroactive, back to 1988.
The Ministry of Health has now said that law prevents the (conveniently overdue) release of the documents about hospital budget plans.
A really expensive way to get no info
Similarly, half of the documents in another request immediately became exempt when the law came into force.
In March, journalist Carly Penrose asked for records held by the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Mines regarding lobbying on mining claims and access to the Ring of Fire region in Northern Ontario.
The initial response was the request result in more than 1,400 pages of results, take an extra 120 days and cost at least $180. After offering to reduce the scope of the request, she got an email saying, because of the legislation change, the request was likely to still incur the same search fee but most, if not all, of the records could be exempt.
Of the 1,414 pages relevant to the request, 744 were held by minister’s offices and were immediately exempt. The other 670 would need to be checked to see if they could be released or not.
There’s a risk that requesters face high search costs to look through documents, most of which then end up being withheld.
Better as an FOI
One way to reduce FOI requests might be to just answer the question (especially when it’s a timely enquiry from a journalist).
Warwickshire Police missed the chance to charge a drink driver after the arresting officer overlooked a blood results email showing he was over the limit and had drugs in his system. The case progression officer neglected to chase the matter or alert superiors, despite the six-month deadline fast approaching.
Asked about other similar cases, the force said 98.7% of drink-driving cases had been processed “within the statutory time limit of prosecutions” from the start of 2023 until the end of 2025. That turned out to be 16 out of 1,207 cases missing the deadline.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service requested details including the month and year, alcohol level and reason for the missed deadline in each of the remaining 15 cases.
The force’s communications department suggested these enquiries were “best suited as FOI (freedom of information) requests”.
When pressed, Warwickshire Police fell short of outright declining to respond but reiterated that it would be “best suited as FOI”, noting that supplying the information would “require substantial data acquisition and detailed analysis”.
The usefulness of FOI releases
An argument for the importance of FOI is released information can help drive better decision-making.
Not sure they were thinking 2027 tour dates for Oasis.
Ahead of the Edinburgh leg of the Oasis tour, council documents released under FOI noted “medium to high intoxication” should be expected at the concert, and that there was some “concern about crowds of Oasis on weekends as they are already rowdy, and the tone of the band”.
Liam Gallagher described Edinburgh Council as “a bunch of snakes” on the first night of shows at Murrayfield Stadium, and said the band was “still waiting for our apology”.
Asked this week if he still had beef with Edinburgh council this week Liam replied: “Not playing there that’s for sure”. He later teased on X: “How you feeling about us possibly playing Celtic park [Glasgow]”.
This week’s Freedom of Information stories…
Battery fires
Fire brigades across the UK are tackling lithium-ion battery fires at a rate of one every five hours, figures show, as fire chiefs warn that public awareness and government regulation have not kept pace with the ubiquity of this new hazard.
Lithium-ion batteries power most rechargeable devices including mobile phones, electric toothbrushes, toys and vapes, as well as ebikes, e-scooters and electric vehicles.
Data gathered by the global business insurer QBE via freedom of information requests reveals that fire brigades were called to 1,760 fires linked to lithium-ion batteries in 2025, equating to 4.8 fires a day, an increase of 147% over the past three years.
Electric vehicle fires rose by 133% over the same period, while the number of electric vehicles on UK roads tripled during that time.
Racial abuse
The BBC submitted Freedom of Information requests to all NHS hospital and mental health trusts in England to ask how many times staff had reported being racially abused by a patient.
From the 106 trusts which provided data, there were 8,235 such reports in 2024, a 17% increase on the 7,002 reports in 2023. Several trusts did not record reports of racism prior to 2023, meaning older comparison figures are not available, but campaigners claim the issue has been growing for several years.
Social media crime
In the West Midlands, there was an over 200% increase in social media user data being used to solve criminal investigations between 2020 and 2025.
Figures released by West Midlands Police under the Freedom of Information act shows Snapchat saw the largest increase in crimes recorded between 2020 and 2025, with an increase of around 540% (310 to 1,985).
No rest
New Freedom of Information data from Police Oracle shows police forces across the UK now owe their officers nearly 820,000 rest days – the equivalent of 2,240 years of lost time with families, lost recovery, and lost wellbeing.
The Metropolitan Police alone owes 215,075 rest days – 589 years’ worth – averaging 6.5 days owed per officer.
The other two of the biggest forces in the country, West Midlands Police and Greater Manchester Police follow with 59,983 and 51,759 rest days owed, respectively.
Child exploitation
The PSNI did not refer a single child arrested during the Ballymena riots into the government mechanism used to identify victims of child criminal exploitation, despite concerns that young people were groomed or coerced into violence.
A third of those arrested following disorder in Ballymena and other towns last year were children, accounting for 33 out of 100 arrests.
Meeting notes obtained through Freedom of Information requests show police and statutory agencies discussed concerns that some young people involved may have been victims of child criminal exploitation (CCE).
Parking scams
Parking scams involving phony QR codes have increased fourteen-fold in the past three years, new data shows.
Unsuspecting motorists scan these codes to pay for parking but are instead redirected to fraudulent websites designed to steal payment details.
In 2022, only nine cases of the scam were reported with a total loss of £322. But last year that number had shot up to 133 reports, with victims losing £29,682.
The data, found through a Freedom of Information request submitted by Ailsa Reliability Solutions, represents a 1,300 per cent increase in reports.
Empty buildings
Sometimes no answer to your FOI is the answer (particularly when the answer is ‘maybe you should have this information?’).
Croydon Council has no central system for tracking the borough’s long-term vacant buildings and stalled development sites, a Freedom of Information (FOI) response has revealed.
The recent FOI response confirmed the council does not operate any standalone process to identify empty properties or paused construction projects across the borough. Furthermore, it revealed council officials do not currently maintain any internal lists, dashboards, or schedules to track the neighbourhood impact of these incomplete projects.
Without this centralised system, the council currently relies on a more ad hoc approach to identifying unused spaces and abandoned plots.
Council sell-off
Public assets worth more than £1.2m were sold by Redcar and Cleveland Council the last financial year – with the prospect of more sales to come.
A recent presentation to council committee members said the local authority was focusing primarily on properties valued at more than £100,000 with a review having taken place as part of a disposal strategy. Meanwhile, another £213,000 worth of sales were due to take place “imminently”.
Separately, the Local Democracy Reporting Service has received information from the BBC, based on freedom of information requests to councils in England and Wales, showing that in Redcar and Cleveland between 2010 and 2025 almost 200 council assets were disposed of. This included schools, a health centre and former community centre, allotments and a museum, along with plots of land and buildings deemed to be surplus to requirements.
Council tax enforcement
Bailiffs were sent to Herefordshire residents to collect council tax funds on more than 4,000 occasions in one year.
In the county, bailiffs were called to residents on 4,351 occasions between April 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026, according to a recent Freedom of Information request.
The figure is nearly unchanged from 2022 to 2023, when 4,370 cases were referred for enforcement.
Repair bills
Only five police stations in Scotland are currently rated as being in a good condition according to a shock new report.
The survey also found that five times as many police offices – 27 – were in a poor state meaning the buildings are showing major defects or not functioning properly. While 158 were rated as merely satisfactory and showing signs of deterioration.
The figures from a report by Police Scotland released under Freedom of Information show that £231 million is now needed to repair the country’s crumbling cop shops.Trai
Train fine
A railway firm has made revenue in the tens of thousands from penalty fares on Cumbrian routes since 2023, a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request has revealed.
The FOI, submitted to Northern Rail by the News & Star, has revealed that the firm made £23,796.45 in penalty fares and prosecution revenue between 2023 and 2025.
A grand total of 675 penalty fare notices were handed out between 2023 and 2025, 365 in 2023; 245 in 2024 and 65 in 2025.
Drink-driving
Analysis of driving license data by the RAC revealed that 217,757 have a ‘DR10’ endorsement and another 2,881 have ‘DR20’ offences on their current motoring record – taking the total to 220,638.
DR10 convictions are issued to those caught over the legal alcohol limit while a DR20 relates to those found to be unfit and impaired at the wheel due to alcohol, regardless of whether they were over the limit or not.
The RAC’s freedom of information request to the DVLA found that 2,553 individuals have accrued three or more DR10 or DR20 endorsements since 2014.
Bank vs agency
Data from freedom of information requests indicate some NHS trusts are paying substantially more for ‘bank’ staff than for agency workers, despite long-standing government claims that reducing agency use would save money.
An NHS “bank” refers to a temporary staffing pool of healthcare workers (nurses, doctors, admin, etc) who take flexible shifts on an as-needed basis to cover shortages.
At Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, which reported no off-framework agency use, the average cost of the five most expensive bank shifts was £5,723 in 2024-25 and £5,622 in 2025-26. By comparison, the five most expensive agency shifts averaged £4,491 and £4,642 respectively.
Police misconduct
A record number of cops were sacked last year for gross misconduct, shock figures reveal. Fourteen officers were dismissed in 2025, compared with six the year before and three in 2023.
The figures, released by Police Scotland under Freedom of Information, have been recorded since 2015 and are the highest in that period.
Stray dogs
The dog marketplace, puppies.co.uk analysed data from Freedom of Information requests sent to Wigan Council.
They asked the council for the number of dogs reported as strays, the number of dogs seized, and the number of stray dogs returned to their owners from January 2021 to December 2025.
In total, 1,314 stray dogs have been reported across the region. Of that number, just 393 have been returned to their owners, meaning that only 29 per cent of stray dogs find their way back home.
Image by Anna Bondarenko on Pexels
