It’s not just Freedom of Information coming under pressure from AI.

Jump to this week’s FOI stories…

The rules for consultations on major energy projects in Scotland were changed in January after an increase in the use of AI in submissions, a freedom of information response to The Ferret shows.

The Energy Consents Unit (ECU) – the team within the Scottish Government which handles applications for projects such as wind farms and pylon lines – now only accepts objections from the public through its own online portal or by post.

The change was made following what the ECU described in internal correspondence as a “significant rise in the use of AI in emailed representations”. This created a “significant administrative burden” and made it harder to distinguish “genuine individual concerns from bulk automated content”, one official wrote.

The ban on emailed responses has triggered objections from ObjectNow, a service which generates objection letters to planning applications with the help of AI.

The freedom of information response shows it wrote to the Scottish Government to protest on January 20, days after the change was made, arguing that it had “never sought to overload the system or generate artificial volumes of representations”.

A spokesperson said calling its objection letters “written by AI” did a “disservice to volunteers who give their time to draft the strong foundational letters” used by the system. The group said those letters are based on extensive analysis of planning documents.

ObjectNow described the ECU’s decision to scrap email responses as “a means of muting the true scale of public opposition” to energy developments and “avoid headlines” such as the over 10,000 objections made to the Kintore to Tealing pylon line.

Does this become the norm?

The change seems to be aimed at putting some of the friction back into making a planning objection.

Previously, the hassle of making complaints, objections and FOI request used to keep numbers low. AI makes things much easier.

The ECU change doesn’t stop people using AI to write their objection. But it does slow them down from generating pages of text and firing it off in an email. Having to paste text into an online form (and particularly one that asks for information over several questions) might make people stick more closely to the point (and makes multiple bot-generated responses more difficult).

This may become a suggested solution for the increasing number of FOI requests and complaints. Allowing public bodies mandate a single electronic route for requests (like a web form), possibly with a word limit, was one of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)’s freelance FOI restriction suggestions.

The issue here is, as this doesn’t stop people using AI to generate requests, it wouldn’t do much to solve issues with overly-complicated requests or inaccurate information. A word count would probably just mean multiple submissions.

There’s also the problem that FOI requests generally involve correspondence. Forms don’t always make keeping track of that easy. What’s conven

Worth an internal review

I don’t think FOI refusals get complained about often enough.

Sometimes they’re well explained and reasonable. But plenty have no explanation, are missing key things like the public interest test or don’t make much sense. Others are more technical but it’s worth asking for an internal review to ensure the exemptions have been applied correctly.

Putney.news sent an FOI request to Wandsworth Council asking about the sums behind a £30m saving it had claimed to be making on its new contract to run Putney Leisure Centre. The claim was in a leaflet sent out to residents in Putney.

Most of the request was refused (late, and after having to complain to the ICO). The council said the figure was supplied by the leisure centre’s contractor, Places Leisure, “in confidence” and so letting anyone know how it had saved money “would be likely to constitute an actionable breach of confidence”.

This implies the council is relying on Section 41 confidentiality. With Section 41, there’s a few issues an internal review (or more likely, a complaint to the ICO) might clear up:

• If the calculation of the £30m saving came from the council based on information from the contractor, that analysis might not be confidential
• If the information was part of the contract, it might not be confidential
• would it actually constitute an actionable breach of confidence? Having prominently shared the £30m figure, the council would need to show what detriment would be caused to the contractor from the disclosure of more information? And if the someone took legal action over it, would the council have a public interest defence (because it’s important for the public to have accurate information about how decisions are made in order to scrutinise them).

Did this really need a Freedom of Information request?

Herefordshire Council was asked in a Freedom of Information request to list all the services that will use the new transport interchange in front of the city’s railway station.

It said in its reply that “at the current moment in time”, 17 services are due to stop there.

The list isn’t fully confirmed. There seems to be debate about the final location of a few services.

However, this seems like the kind of thing that should be on a web page providing the public with updates on the project.

If someone sends an FOI, it gets released anyway. So any view that it shouldn’t be shared till it’s been confirmed becomes pointless.

Or it gets published just before the changes come into effect. Which usually leads to weeks of the public wandering round missing buses they can’t find. Something that might have been avoided with a longer lead time.

This week’s Freedom of Information stories…

Intimate image abuse

Five years ago, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 made threatening to share intimate images a criminal offence, building on the law introduced six years earlier that had criminalised the act of sharing itself.

Between July 2021 and February 2026, police forces in England and Wales recorded 21,905 intimate image abuse offences. Of those, just 4.8 percent, 1,047 cases, resulted in a charge or summons. In 56 percent of cases where a suspect had already been identified, nobody was charged at all.

The data, obtained through Freedom of Information requests to all 43 forces in England and Wales, of which 27 responded.

Only 11 of the 27 responding forces were able to provide a breakdown of offences specifically recorded as threats to share. Among those 11 forces, recorded threats to share offences rose by 344 percent between 2021-22 and 2024-25.

Energy drinks

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the words ‘energy drink’ and relevant variations have been mentioned on a death certificate registered in England and Wales five times between 2001 and 2024.

That included three times where the cause of death was registered as accidental poisoning by and exposure to noxious substances, once when the cause was intentional self harm, and once when the death was related to a heart condition.

These figures were compiled by the ONS following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Cable and are likely an undercount of the number of deaths linked to the consumption of energy drinks.

Trial of the facts

Sixty so-called ‘trials of the facts’ have taken place in Northern Ireland courts in the last five years.

The little-known legal proceedings were ushered to the fore of public debate in recent months after now-convicted child sex abuser Jeffrey Donaldson’s wife Eleanor Donaldson was judged not mentally fit to stand trial.

New figures obtained by the Irish News show cases in Northern Ireland courts that have been dealt with by a trial of the facts are more common than some may perceive.

The data, provided by the Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunal Service in response to a Freedom of Information request, showed that there have been 60 cases dealt with between 2020 and 2025 that required a trial of the facts.

Not recorded

Insurance brokers often rely on a clean Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) or Police National Computer (PNC) check to reassure clients on a used vehicle purchase, or to help inform motor underwriting decisions.

A vehicle can be genuinely stolen and still return a clean result on both the PNC and DVLA within weeks of the theft being reported.

When a vehicle theft is reported, a Lost or Stolen (LoS) marker is placed on the PNC. If that marker is not confirmed by the constabulary within six weeks, the record is automatically removed, known as weeding, and the LoS status is never passed to the DVLA.

QuestGates, an insurance loss adjusting and claims solutions group, submitted Freedom of Information requests to 44 individual constabularies across England and Wales. The analysis found that the DVLA recorded 87,452 stolen vehicles in 2025, compared with a police-reported total of between 107,734 and 115,710, depending on methodology.

Missed appointments

The true scale of the impact of an ongoing pay dispute in a Welsh health board has been revealed. In just three months, more than 20,000 health visitor appointments in Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board were missed as further strike action is announced.

‌Health visitors working in the health board have been on strike for 23 weeks since February 23.

A freedom of information request submitted by Unite has revealed the impact strikes are having on families. The data shows that just over 900 of the nearly 24,000 health visitor appointments due across March, April and May were completed due to the strikes.

Long A&E waits

Patients attending the accident and emergency department at Croydon University Hospital are spending a lot longer inside, new data has revealed.

According to a freedom of information request gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), the average total time a patient spends at the Mayday Road A&E facility has jumped from 257 minutes in 2021 to 390 minutes in 2025.

Taxi licences

Nearly 18,000 drivers have already been given special payments by Transport for London due to the licensing problems. They were granted compensation of between £300 and £500 under the Goodwill Payment Scheme.

The scheme was introduced at the start of the year to compensate taxi and private hire vehicle (PHV) drivers whose livelihoods were affected by the licensing delays.

They were caused by the introduction of new licence processing software, coupled with the recovery from an earlier cyber security incident.

TfL was threatened with legal action due to the “significant hardship” suffered by minicab drivers waiting months to have their licences renewed.

The Tories stressed that the figures, which they obtained under a freedom of information (FOI) request, revealed the scale of the disruption caused by TfL’s licensing failures.

Student loans

Young people need better careers guidance and more flexibility over their study choices, campaigners have said, after new figures revealed tens of thousands of former students are still repaying loans for courses they never finished.

The data, shared exclusively with The i Paper, reveals that 191,500 people are repaying student loans despite never having finished a degree. The data covers those who took out a loan after 2021 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Between them, they owe more than £5.9bn, and that figure is set to grow as interest on their loans bites, the data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Teneo International School shows.

Dog safety

Dogs Trust has launched a new campaign with the catchline “If in doubt, keep your dog out”, in an attempt to reduce the injuries and fatalities that can occur among dogs and their owners around lakes, canals, rivers and the sea.

Data from the Canal & River Trust shows that dog-related incidents in the UK reached a five-year high in 2025, increasing by 39% compared with the previous year.

Some of the data apparently came from FOI. The Canal & River Trust is a charity, but it is covered by the Freedom of Information Act in relation to the statutory functions it inherited from British Waterways.

Bin varieties

According to new research based on Freedom of Information requests, commercial waste services provider Direct365 found at least 80 different combinations of bin colours are currently in use across 190 local authorities.

Since March 2025, most workplaces in England have been required to separate dry recyclable materials and food waste under the Government’s Simpler Recycling reforms.

While the legislation standardises what businesses are expected to recycle, the research suggests that local differences in bin colours mean employees can encounter different visual systems from one site to another, particularly in organisations operating multiple offices, depots or facilities.

Image by Hiago Rocha on Pexels