If regulators would like to avoid Freedom of Information complaints, they might like to try issuing more guidance.
Jump to this week’s FOI stories…
FOI requests about councillors’ unpaid council tax bills turn up almost as regularly as council tax bills. They also get refused and then overturned by the ICO on a pretty regular basis.
There’s three reasons for this:
- if a councillor has arrears of more than two months, they can’t vote on matters that concern council tax
- which is the kind of thing local papers are interested in
- a 2016 Upper Tribunal ruling said there was a “compelling legitimate interest in the public knowing whether a particular councillor has failed to pay the council tax”, apart from in “exceptional“ personal circumstances
The ongoing problem seems to be that councils either interpret exceptional so widely it’s not actually exceptional. Or they’re just avoiding making a decision, leaving it up to the ICO to tell them what to do.
Another unpaid council tax Freedom of Information request
Two councillors in North Tyneside who received court summonses over unpaid council tax have been named after the ICO overturned a refusal.
The Commissioner found that, while a third councillor shouldn’t be named as harm and distress from the disclosure outweighed the legitimate interest, the personal circumstances of the other two weren’t exceptional. Instead, their circumstances were “reasonably common and could be experienced by many people”.
Both councillors are quoted in the subsequent news story explaining that the missed payments resulted from financial difficulties (being between jobs or unforeseen financial pressures).
What even are ‘exceptional’ circumstances
At this point, it would probably help if the ICO explained situations it’s highly unlikely to accept as exceptional. It might help councils work out whether a refusal is likely to be overturned.
Liverpool Council even referred themselves to the ICO in 2024 over this issue. They said the matter raised “important issues of principle with wider implications for local government”, and asked the ICO to provide further guidance.
As most decision notices don’t cover the personal circumstances in question (as they then be linked to the individuals involved), their benefit is limited in giving councils a clue what to do.
But as there’s been plenty of them, so it’s probably fine to draw some broad lessons. And general financial issues or a lack of organisation look like they’re unlikely to be accepted.
It possibly also wants to reiterate that trying to re-argue the point about expectations of privacy covered in the UT ruling are going nowhere. And that goes extra for cases involving court summonses.
Freedom of Information refusal
Another refusal that should be heading for an internal review and possibly a complaint to the ICO.
People have been in touch with the Witney Gazette complaining about parking fines at sites run by Oxford University Hospitals Trust. So the paper sent an FOI request asking, presumably, about the number of fines issued before and after a rule change.
It’s not clear if the article quotes the whole refusal but from the story it’s hard to tell who actually holds the information and what the refusal is based on.
The trust says it doesn’t hold the information. It gets “high‑level assurance” information from Parking Eye but everything else is controlled by Parking Eye. While we also don’t have the original FOI request, it seems odd that the number of parking fines issued by the parking enforcement company isn’t in the high-level assurance information.
The trust then apparently asked Parking Eye if it would disclose the information to the trust (so they could pass it on?). It refused to do so saying the information was commercially sensitive and exempt under section 43 commercial interests.
Parking Eye isn’t a public body, so I’m not sure why its refusing FOI requests. More likely, this means it does hold information on behalf of the trust that is subject to the FOI Act (so the trust is wrong to say it doesn’t hold the information).
This information may be exempt based on potential prejudice to commercial interests. But as the story doesn’t mention what the commercial interests are and how disclosure would harm them, that’s debatable.
Information Commissioner resigns
John Edwards, the UK Information Commissioner, has resigned from his position.
Though Jon Baines points out, he can’t quite just resign. As a Crown appointee, he instead has to ask the King to be relieved of his position.
Mr Edwards had voluntarily stepped back from his role at the end of February as an independent workplace investigation was ongoing.
The investigation concluded there was a case to answer and made clear Mr Edward’s behaviour fell short of the conduct expected from a public official.
This week’s Freedom of Information stories…
Football kit
Camden Council has seized more than £400,000 in counterfeit football kits as the World Cup 2026 gets underway.
The 4,425 kits were seized from the streets of north London in the space of just three months from February 2026 to May 2026.
Freedom of Information requests by casino.org have revealed that as many as 10,000 phony football strips have been confiscated in Camden Market between January 2025 to now.
Violence in shops
A Freedom of Information request shows more than 200 violent incidents at Britain’s two biggest High Street chains, JD Sports and Sports Direct, in the last year
In total, a Freedom of Information request revealed more than 200 violent incidents linked to the two stores last year. They include 144 crimes linked to Sports Direct and 73 linked to JD Sports. The Metropolitan Police recording the highest total, with 55 incidents across the two chains.
Maintenance payments
Tens of thousands of children in Scotland could be missing out on the financial support they are entitled to, figures obtained by the Scottish Liberal Democrats have shown.
Data released under a freedom of information request reveals up to 22,760 parents are in arrears on their Child Maintenance Service (CMS) payments.
The figures also indicate there are around 180 cases where more than £20,000 in child maintenance is owed.
Mouldy homes
More than 1 in 10 forces family homes have been treated for damp and mould in the last six months, according to the results of a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by BFBS Forces News.
The MOD currently has 47,700 SFA properties in the UK. According to the FOI, between April and November 2025, there have been 6,391 reports of damp and mould.
Over the same time period there have been 5,550 SFA properties treated for damp and mould – that is 11.6% of SFA, so more than one in 10.
During that time 20 families were offered alternative accommodation because the problem was so bad.
Cycle storage
Almost 14,000 applications are waiting for spaces in Lambeth Council’s lockable on-street cycle hangars, Freedom of Information (FOI) responses show.
The figure is 80% higher than the 7,755 outstanding applications for hangar space in Haringey – which has the second-longest waitlist in London.
Lambeth has the fourth-highest total number of hangars in London at 828 and the fifth-highest number of hangar spaces per 1,000 residents at 16, the FOI data reveals.
Anti-social behaviour
A Freedom of Information request submitted by BirminghamLive revealed police attended to 51.4 per cent of all recorded antisocial behaviour incidents (ASB) last year.
This boils down to a figure of 10,328 ASB incidents recorded by the police, with police called out to a total of 5,290 incidents.
Puppy breeding
New figures obtained by RSPCA Cymru under the Freedom of Information Act show that Carmarthenshire County Council undertook 46 dog breeding investigations in 2025, down from 59 in 2024.
The number of prosecutions in the county also fell sharply, from 12 in 2024 to three in 2025.
Across Wales, however, the picture is different. Local authorities carried out 210 investigations into suspected irresponsible or illicit puppy trading in 2025, compared with 144 the previous year — a rise of 46%.
Cybersecurity
This one’s notable for the apparently terrible response rate, especially given it seems to have included district and county councils.
To understand how councils across the UK approach cybersecurity training, Skillcast issued Freedom of Information requests to local councils, before analysing their respective cybersecurity awareness training policies.
Questions focused on the quantity of staff members who have taken part in training over the past year, whether the training is mandatory or not, and the frequency of refresher training.
Only 10% of UK councils were found to have robust cybersecurity training policies, with only four out of the 37 who responded achieving top marks from the training company.
Potholes
Filling rather than being complained about or causing compensation claims for once.
The JCB Pothole Pro has been touted as capable of repairing potholes “in just eight minutes”.
The £66,000 machine was adopted by the Reform-run Nottinghamshire County Council, which said that the machine would “help to clear backlogs more quickly”.
But highway bosses at Leicestershire County Council (LCC), also run by Reform, have decided against a similar approach.
According to a Freedom of Information request, highway bosses said the machine “did not stack up as an economical piece of kit to repair potholes in Leicestershire” because it was too slow to fix potholes, required “specialist labour and operators”, as well as providing a “similar output” to what highway bosses are currently using.
More pothole maintenance
Sheffield’s potholes contractor has been fined eight times this year, amid anger over shoddy work and 13,000 repairs.
Sheffield City Council said it had penalised Amey for failing to tackle ‘category one defects’, deemed an ‘immediate hazard’, within 24 hours.
But it refused to reveal how much, stating the need to protect the company’s interests outweighed the public’s right to know.
In a Freedom of Information response, the city council said Amey repaired 8,929 potholes in the first four months of 2026. But as of May 8, it still had 4,088 to fix.
Bus lane cameras
This one probably shouldn’t have required an FOI request.
The locations of seven bus lane cameras in Cardiff which caught out 114 rule-breaking drivers every single day in their first month can now be revealed.
Cardiff Council had refused to disclose the sites of the cameras – which could land drivers with fines totalling nearly £3m in a single year – but their positions were revealed after a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
The cameras are currently positioned in six spots around the city centre – in Newport Road, Westgate Street, Park Place, Custom House Street, Duke Street and Kingsway – as well in Crwys Road in Cathays.
Data centres
South Oxfordshire has become a hub for new data centre developments.
The district recorded the highest number of planning applications for data centres in England between 2021 and 2026, according to data collected through Freedom of Information requests by 2580 Group.
South Oxfordshire District Council received seven applications during this period, approving six of them.
Cosmetic complaints
Complaints about cosmetic treatments and beauty products in Hampshire increased between 2023 and 2024, according to figures released in a Freedom of Information request.
Hampshire County Council received 79 complaints in 2023, rising to 122 in 2024. A further 29 complaints were recorded in 2025.
Common concerns from consumers include misleading claims, unclear descriptions and worries about how effective treatments are.
Despite the rise in complaints, trading standards confirmed that no enforcement action was taken and no products were seized during the period.
Wrong way
Motorway designers are being urged to “up their game” after an investigation found reported incidents of wrong-way driving on the roads have increased by 30% in four years.
The RAC Foundation issued the plea after National Highways figures obtained by the Press Association showed 947 incidents involving “oncoming vehicles” were reported on England’s motorways in the 12 months to May 11.
That is up from 729 during the same period four years earlier and represents an average of 18 every week.
The data, released in response to a Freedom of Information request, relates to reports of wrong-way driving made to National Highways’ operations centres by various sources such as the police, traffic officers and the public.
Big cats
A panther, a leopard and a Canadian lynx are among the reported sightings of big cats in Wales, according to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
Fifteen “big cats” were reported to authorities in Wales between January 2020 and July 2025, the FOI to the Welsh government found.
The apparent spottings were made in areas ranging from Pembrokeshire to Ceredigion, Powys, Swansea, Denbighshire and Carmarthenshire.
A “puma-sized cat” was also reported in Fairy Falls, Trefnant, Denbighshire on 25 October 2023, but no action was taken after an investigation by North Wales Police confirmed it was not a real cat.
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