FOI Friday has been on a bit of a break…but now it’s back with another load of Freedom of Information stories.

Jump to this week’s FOI stories

When making FOI requests, it’s worth checking which public bodies you can send them to (and who might hold what information). There’s probably more FOI-able bodies than you realise (there’s apparently more than the Scottish Information Commissioner realised there would be).

Part of the reason for the hiatus has been that I’ve been away in New Zealand, with a brief stop of Melbourne. In other news from the other side of the world, the Australian Government’s bid to make it more difficult to make FOI requests is dead (at least for now).

Meanwhile, the Scottish Government is still involved in a seemingly never-ending row with the Scottish Information Commissioner about FOI requests. And it’s rarely a good sign when councillors have to FOI their own council for information (and worse when they’re getting slow responses).

This week’s Freedom of Information stories

GP scarcity

NHS Highland is suffering an almost 40 per cent vacancy rate for GPs across the region, new figures have revealed.

Data obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request shows that, as of March last year, the health board was facing a 38 per cent vacancy rate, with a total of 14 vacancies spread across 9.83 full time equivalent positions.

In 2024 there where nine GP vacancies in NHS run practices, the equivalent of 8.1 full time staff (35 per cent).

Bounced emails

Hundreds of parents failed to receive an email about school admission changes ahead of the application deadline because a council tried to add too many people to the BCC field.

The email set out the decision not to cut the admission numbers at Blatchington Mill, in Hove, and Dorothy Stringer, in Brighton, after a challenge by campaign groups to changes to the admissions criteria. The schools adjudicator published its decision on October 20.

In a response to an FOI request asking what happened, the council said it sent out 1,156 emails about the decision to parents who had applied for places for the children before October 19.

An internal review request queried what the council meant when it said it had sent out 1,156 emails and what evidence it had that those were sent/received. The council then said 656 emails weren’t delivered because the email system limits sending messages to 500 addresses.

But the council has now admitted the limit meant the email failed to send to anyone. The FOI response document had included an email stating “your message was not delivered to anyone” and 120 pages of undelivered email alerts.

Second-hand sales

A follow-up to a follow-up. First you ask how much the shiny new initiative cost…then you ask how much the now less shiny initiative cost to shut down.

A Welsh police force purchased four tuk-tuks in 2022 for £34,300 and sold them two years later for £5,950. The figures emerged following a Freedom of Information request by Newport Conservative campaigner Mike Enea.

‌Gwent Police used the vehicles to provide “safe spaces” in Newport and Abergavenny, allowing residents in the area to seek advice on crime prevention, report incidents and get help if they were feeling unsafe, it said. ‌

The force decided to purchase the tuk-tuks after receiving funding from Home Office’s Safer Streets project that was launched in 2021.

New homes

As the new government multi-billion-pound fund for social and affordable housing opens for bids, an investigation by the Travellers Times reveals only eight councils bid for funding to build socially rented Traveller pitches in the previous fund that ran from 2016-2023.

The Affordable Homes Programme aimed to increase the number of new socially rented and affordable homes by providing ring-fenced funding to local authorities, housing associations and commercial house builders.

Freedom of information requests to Homes England found eight councils and housing associations successfully bid for ten schemes that delivered a total of 108 pitches. The amount of money awarded to build new Traveller pitches came to £7.1m – which is just over 0.1% of the total awarded to all housing schemes.

Homelessness

New research from Centrepoint, obtained by a Freedom of Information request, has found that 629 young people in Warrington faced homelessness last year.

This is an increase compared to the year before when the figure was 494.

Nationally, Centrepoint found 123,934 young people faced homelessness across the U.K. in 2024/25.

Weight loss jabs

The deaths of two people in Northern Ireland potentially linked to weight-loss injections have been reported to the government agency responsible for ensuring medicines are safe.

The data on suspected reactions reported from Northern Ireland in 2024 and 2025 was released in response to a Freedom of Information request.

The two cases are among more than 500 suspected adverse drug reaction reports submitted to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency from Northern Ireland over the last two years related to GLP-1 medications.

Lack of education

Boys in Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) are still not getting enough education and activity, official figures have shown.

Data released by the Ministry of Justice to the Howard League for Penal Reform under the Freedom of Information Act show that none of the three YOIs in England are delivering the legal requirement of at least 15 hours of education per week to child prisoners.

The Howard League said the monthly average time children were out of their cells and in education at England’s three YOIs had barely improved since early 2024, when the charity last raised concerns.

Fire doors

Under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, which came into effect in January 2023, fire doors in high-risk residential buildings should be inspected at least once every 12 months.

According to data from freedom of information requests to local authorities in England asking about social housing, only 46% of front door entrances had been inspected at least once since the regulations were introduced. For communal fire doors in shared spaces, this figure was 89%.

Just 37% of front entrance doors were certified to at least FD30 (guaranteed to hold back fire for 30 minutes). For communal doors, this figure dropped to 33%.

Museum pieces

An investigation by the Guardian found that UK museums hold more than 263,000 items of human remains from around the world, including whole skeletons, preserved bodies, such as Egyptian mummies, skulls, bones, skin, teeth, nails, scalps and hair.

Responses to freedom of information (FoI) requests revealed that 37,000 items of human remains are known to originate from overseas, including thousands from former British colonies. The countries of origin of another 16,000 items are unknown.

Party prices

A council which put its tax up by the maximum amount has come under fire for spending more than £11,000 on a party for staff.

The awards ceremony is understood to have been held annually for several years but the £11,193 spending on the most recent one, held at Hunters Hall, Swanton Morley, has only just emerged following a Freedom of Information request.

However, Breckland Council has defended the event, saying it was to celebrate hard-working employees and reduce staff turnover.

Potholes

It appears to have been a bumper winter for rain and potholes.

A Priory Wood resident has started a petition calling for “a full resurfacing” of the area’s roads, adding that Herefordshire Council “do an absolutely shocking job”.

A freedom of information request to the authority revealed there had been 218 “patching jobs” since 2023, carried out on 17 visits by contractors, which had a total cost of £10,503.69.

Pothole compensation

The likely consequence of potholes seems to be pothole compensation.

West Northamptonshire Council has spent more than £130,000 on pothole compensation in the past four years, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed.

The authority paid out £11,000 in pothole-related claims in 2022, £53,000 in 2023, £56,000 in 2024 and £11,769 last year – though several cases are still pending a decision.

According to the FOI data, the number of pothole claims more than doubled from 408 in 2022 to 955 in 2023.

Stormy McStormFace

This is what happens when you ask the public for naming suggestions.

Elon Gust and Dame Judi Drench were among the names that have been submitted to the Met Office for UK storms. The public has been able to suggest names every year since 2015 but only about 20 are usually chosen.

Others that have been put forward include: Stormy McStormFace, Keir Stormer, David Blowy, Storm Prince Andrew, Bruce Spring Storm, Fifty Shades of Rain, and Stormzy.

The names were revealed by a Freedom of Information request to the Met Office.

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