One in eight people say they’ve made a Freedom of Information request because AI suggested it.
Jump to this week’s FOI stories…
That’s according to a poll by the Information Commissioner’s Office where around 12% of people said they made an FOI request because a generative AI prompted them to do so when they have been researching something.
Sharing the poll, Warren Seddon, director, FOI and transparency, at the ICO, told a committee of MPs, he couldn’t say definitively that the massive increase in complaints the ICO is seeing is down to AI. However, a big rise in complaints seen by many organisations coinciding with increased access to generative AI suggested a link.
FOI complaints over the past 12 months rose 16% in Q1, 38% in Q2, and then 60% in Q3 and Q4. Historically, they rose 20-25% every five years.
Ben Worthy, an academic who researches FOI, told the Procedure Committee session that surveys of FOI officers found they thought 5% of requests were AI-assisted in January 2026. By January 2026, that was 11%.
He said there’s a question about what AI-assisted means. It could be requests that have been tidied up using AI, it could be suggested by AI or AI may generate the whole thing, someone could use AI agents to automate asking FOI requests entirely.
Requests generated by AI tend to be more complicated and harder to work through, and often involve more communication with the person who sent them, he added. Although some FOI officers in the survey said AI improved some requests as they got to the point quicker.
The ICO has issued guidance on how to handle AI-assisted requests. And Cheshire East Council has added a section to its FOI page with some of the advice.
The council said it was seeing an increase in requests and related correspondence that appears AI generated. Requests that are inaccurate or unnecessary complex need extra clarification and cause delays.
(Apparently public bodies do pay attention to ICO guidance. Maybe they should try putting out some more. Might help improve FOI performance, reduce complaints, and make everyone’s life easier?)
How to deal with AI Freedom of Information requests
The same ICO poll that found AI is suggesting people use FOI found 29% of people said they made the request because of an issue that matters to them.
People using FOI to find out about things that are important to them is a good thing, we want more of that.
If it’s taken AI for them to learn they can, that’s a failure to highlight the Act to people who could use it. I think there may have been a view that people should know about it but don’t promote it too much so public bodies aren’t inundated with requests. Unfortunately, that’s happened, but with added misinformation to extra clog up the workings.
There’s an interesting point that Alex Parsons, democracy lead and senior researcher at mySociety, touches on. A potential efficiency of WhatDoTheyKnow is that responses are public, so people can search and avoid making repeat requests.
It seems like there might be a way to reduce the AI-assisted FOI boom. Public bodies need to get a lot keener about getting information to people who are interested so they know about it before they start asking ChatGPT. That, or if it’s out there, AI might at least use it to produce an answer before suggesting an FOI request.
The FOI complaint backlog is bad
The ICO is currently taking eight months to allocate non-priority complaints to case officers for investigation. Its projecting by the end of this financial year it will take about 16 months to allocate a case.
The ICO aims to allocate complaints within 12 weeks. This doesn’t include complaints that have been prioritised and are supposed to be allocated within four weeks.
A 16 month wait for a case officer is worse than when Warren Seddon was launching his push to speed up complaint resolutions and cut the pandemic backlog. Back then the wait was about a year.
How MPs use FOI
It’s not just Freedom of Information seeing complaints about more requests and slow poor-quality responses.
The discussions of FOI above were part of a House of Commons Procedure Committee review of the Written Parliamentary Questions (WPQs) system amid concerns its coming under strain and not fully delivering on its intended purpose.
The committee has been taking evidence on how WPQs and FOI interact – how MPs use one or the other or both, and the challenges facing both.
WPQs allow MPs to obtain detailed and targeted information to help scrutinise Government policy and operations.
There’s some crossover with FOI – they generally follow the same rules for refusing to share information, the cost limit is set at 140% of the FOI cost limit and it can include producing a bit of analysis or explanation. But there’s no right to appeal for WPQs.
MPs will use WPQs to ask about information published under FOIs, raise FOI questions on behalf of constituents and even chase FOI responses. But they’re not big users of FOI.
Dr Worthy estimates somewhere between 1% and 5% of all FOI requests are put in by MPs. His research breaks MP’s FOI use into three groups:
- The personal campaigns or crusaders – about 15 to 20 regular users of freedom of information
- Political parties, using organised campaigns around their different portfolios. It used to be Labour, it’s now the Conservatives, and Plaid Cymru were keen users (at least until recently, probably)
- MPs who are given or come across FOI data from other people and then use it
So the UK’s MPs aren’t big users of FOI, possibly because they have an alternative in WPQs that should be quicker.
In comparison, a report looking at the FOI performance of several government departments in Australia found, of the requests looked at, more came from politicians (28%) than journalists (25%).
The cost limit might not be in imminent risk of reduction
The UK Government has floated that it might like to reduce the cost limit for answering FOI requests as a way to reduce requests.
Warren Seddon at the ICO doesn’t seem particularly keen (but that might be because the ICO has come up with its own collection of potential restrictions).
Currently, staff time for dealing with FOI requests is charged at a flat rate of £25 an hour, and the limit is per request is set at £600 for central government (or 24 hours) and £450 for other public bodies (or 18 hours).
Mr Seddon told the same committee of MPs: “There has been a bit of debate about it in the past, but it broadly works as it stands.”
His argument seems to be that the current limit works quite well at the moment in how it is applied.
That’s mostly because it’s tied to locating information, which makes it easier to evaluate how reasonable estimates are. If you start to add things like thinking time, it becomes much harder to judge.
Also because the limits haven’t changed, people have experience of how that limit works in practice.
Ongoing threat to Freedom of Information
Ontario is currently acting as an excellent (and worrying) example of what actually happens if make FOI laws more restrictive.
So far the retroactive law change to exempt minister’s records from scrutiny has been used to deny access to hundreds of records about a lobbying scandal to The Trillium, deny Global News access to documents that staff in the premier’s office kept outside of secure government systems, and deny The Canadian Press access to information about hospital budget cuts.
Briefings on flu, RSV and COVID-19 rates prepared for Ontario’s minister of health also cannot be released publicly under the restrictive new transparency rules.
Now, it may have shut down FOI in relation to the Ontario government completely.
A Microsoft Teams message was reportedly sent out to senior staff within the government’s access to information departments. Staff were told to pause all fee estimates, extensions, decision letters and the release of documents, according to The Trillium.
The pause, Global News reports, is at least partly prompted by the confusion and questions the changes have created. Government lawyers are apparently still figuring out exactly how the law will be applied and how to fight potential appeals.
The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, which was trying to verify the existence of a freeze, said: “An outright freeze on the processing of FOI requests, if there is one, would raise significant concerns about the public’s right of access to government-held information, transparency, and accountability.”
And you don’t even have to change the law…
The Australian Government didn’t manage to make changes to restrict FOI. But that doesn’t mean getting information is easy.
The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) examined how three agencies dealt with FOI: the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury, and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sports and the Arts.
The verdict? They don’t help requesters to make their request processable, they aren’t properly searching for documents, they’re slow, they don’t release documents they should, and they don’t update disclosure logs.
They also do a lot of ‘courtesy consulting’ of ministers about requests. And not much keeping records about those consults.
The report found 62% of Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)ll review decisions resulted in a reversal of an agency’s decision to refuse access.
All of this might sound familiar. But it means that, while passing restrictions on FOI makes getting information much harder, a culture of not cooperating can have a similar impact.
This week’s Freedom of Information stories…
Mental health crisis
Children experiencing a mental health crisis are being forced to spend up to three days in A&E before a specialist bed becomes available, NHS figures show.
To conduct the research, Freedom of Information requests were submitted by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to NHS trusts across England. They revealed the number of under-18s in mental health crisis waiting at least 12 hours for admission to a specialist unit has more than trebled, rising from 237 in 2019 to 802 in 2025.
Three trusts – Barts Health and Lewisham, Greenwich in London and Morecambe Bay in Cumbria – reported cases where children waited three days or more in A&E before a bed became available.
By-election costs
You thought elections were over. But if councillors quit and a by-election has to be held, it ends up costing councils.
Some by-elections due to ill-health or deaths are usual, but Reform councillors keep having to quit due to vetting issues. And the Greens councillors have accidentally been elected when they weren’t eligible to stand.
Since May last year, 17 of Reform’s councillors have vacated their seats. In 12 of these cases (70 per cent) the circumstances related to vetting or conduct issues, a lack of engagement with council duties, or basic administrative issues that were not spotted.
Of the 12 former Reform councillors, 11 are set to cost local taxpayers £287,000 in by-election costs, figures obtained by The Independent through Freedom of Information requests indicate.
Six Green councillors have stood down in London since elections there. One has been suspended from the party, while three are ineligible to serve as councillors – two because they work for the local council as teachers.
Unspent cash
More than £31 million of Stoke-on-Trent’s Levelling Up money remains unspent – nearly five years after the funding was announced. Stoke-on-Trent City Council was awarded £56 million for a raft of regeneration schemes by the Boris Johnson government in 2021, three Prime Ministers ago.
But figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request show that the city council has yet to spend most of the money. The Goods Yard development next to Stoke Station, which was allocated £16 million of funding, is still the only one of Stoke-on-Trent’s Levelling Up schemes to be completed so far.
Red routes
Scotrail has revealed its “red list” of train services that have the highest levels of youth antisocial behaviour and drunk passengers.
The rail operator uses a traffic-light system to rate routes with the most issues, including the likes of antisocial behaviour, trespassing, and staff experiencing verbal abuse.
With hundreds of train services travelling across Scotland every day, it has been revealed that the Stirling to Arbroath and Edinburgh to Dunblane routes were placed on the highest level of ScotRail’s traffic-light system.
The Courier also revealed through a Freedom of Information request that two routes through Fife were also given an amber rating after reports of vandalism and train staff being assaulted.
Communication requests
The Metropolitan Police asked tech companies to give officers access to private communications data over 700,000 times in 2025 alone, according to figures obtained by The Register under the Freedom of Information Act.
These statistics expose the monitoring of everyday platforms like takeaway delivery services, and also show a massive surge in the force’s surveillance of the users of low cost MVNO LycaMobile. Additionally, the FoI exposed the acquisition of data from encrypted messaging services designed to offer privacy.
Unregulated residential child care
More than £3.4 million was spent placing children in unregulated accommodation last year by Hampshire County Council due to a shortage of registered care placements, newly released figures show.
A Freedom of Information response reveals between April 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025, the authority spent £3,422,799 on unregulated placements.
HCC recorded 22 uses of unregulated settings over the period, including four longer-term placements and 18 brief placements involving looked after children.
Tube travel
It’s always worth keeping an eye on disclosure logs for public bodies that actually keep them updated.
Tottenham Court Road is the busiest London Underground station, new figures from Transport for London (TfL) show.
A total of 63.4m people used the Northern and Central line station, which also connects to the Elizabeth line, in 2025. The least used station is Roding Valley on the Central line in Essex.
The data was revealed in a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request, and counts actual entry and exit taps, rather than an annualised average.
Cheating
Two London universities kicked out students for cheating with artificial intelligence in the last academic year, according to new data.
Both University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London expelled students during the 2024-25 academic year, according to data released under the Freedom of Information Act.
More than 2,000 undergraduates at Russell Group universities were punished for misusing generative AI tools in 2024-25, compared to around 700 in 2023-24, data collected by The Times shows.
Prison smuggling
Exclusive data obtained by Edinburgh Live reveals multiple cases of narcotics being smuggled into HMP Addiewell.
Cannabis, spice, tablets and street valium are just some of the drugs non-inmates have attempted to smuggle into the jail over the last five years.
A Freedom of Information request by Edinburgh Live reveals 42 incidents of drug smuggling within the prison. These attempts have been made through three different methods – throw overs, drones and during visits.
Shoplifting arrests
The number of people arrested for shoplifting in York has continued to increase over the last five years, new figures show.
Figures from North Yorkshire Police, revealed by a Freedom of Information request by The Press, showed that 466 people were arrested for shoplifting in York last year – up 64 from 2024.
It compares to 362 arrests for shoplifting in York in 2023, 262 in 2022 and 253 in 2021.
Child criminals
A one-year-old girl was among hundreds of Kent children recorded as crime suspects. She was reported to police after another child suffered a minor injury.
The data, obtained via a Freedom of Information request to Kent Police, also included six two-year-olds, 11 three-year-olds and 20 four-year-olds reported to police.
Speeding
A driver was caught doing 154mph at a speeding hotspot on a dual carriageway by a speed camera, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed.
The motorist was clocked on the A14 at Fenstanton in 2023, where others were captured doing 124mph in 2024 – and 143mph in 2025.
Tattoo studios
Over 140 tattoo studios, and 240 tattooists, have been registered in Herefordshire over the last decade, with new figures suggesting growth in the trade has yet to level off in the county.
Herefordshire Council was asked in a Freedom of Information request how many tattoo studios, premises providing tattooing services and individual practitioners were licensed with it in each of the past ten years.
Missing library books
Outer London borough libraries are more likely to see children’s books go missing than inner boroughs, a series of Freedom of Information requests has shown.
Of the 13 boroughs that supplied information, nine of them have seen an increase in children’s books going missing – just under 70%. Out of those nine, seven of them are in outer London.
In Sutton Central Library, 620 more children’s books went missing in 2025/26 alone compared to adult books, and picture books constituted almost a quarter – so there is a demand.
Speeding caravans
Drivers in two of Britain’s best-known holiday destinations are being caught out by a little-known speeding rule linked to caravans and motorhomes, with new figures showing the South West dominates the national totals.
Data obtained from the DVLA under the Freedom of Information Act shows Devon and Cornwall accounted for more than one in five SP20 driving endorsements issued across Britain between 2022 and 2025.
The SP20 code is issued when motorists exceed the speed limit specific to their type of vehicle, including caravans, motorhomes and vehicles towing trailers.
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