Should you be able to send a Freedom of Information request to the King?
Jump to this week’s FOI stories…
The Royals aren’t currently directly covered by the FOI Act. And Section 37 exempts “communications with the sovereign” and their heirs from disclosure.
Green MP Sian Berry is set to introduce a bill to amend the Act to make the Royal Household and the Sovereign public authorities. It would also scrape the Section 37 exemption.
Her proposed Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill also seeks to extend coverage to the Royal Archive, 250 years worth of historical documents housed at Windsor Castle’s Round Tower, as well as the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster.
Ms Berry said: “It is outrageous that there is a specific carve-out under freedom of information legislation for the royal family. This unnecessarily shields what should be a perfectly normally accountable part of our constitution, and it has to go.”
Public funding = public right to know?
There’s a good argument for treating the Royal Household as a public body. It receives public money and its actions have an impact on the public and other public bodies. And I’m in favour of more transparency (although I’m also in favour of just not having Royals).
The entire situation with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor highlights why a lack of accountability is a problem. The rising cost of the taxpayer-funded sovereign grant and refurbishments to an unoccupied Buckingham Palace might also benefit from more scrutiny.
There’s been some recent moves to open up Royal workings a little more.
Earlier this year MPs voted to demand the publication of papers concerning Andrew’s 2001 appointment as a special representative for trade and investment.
A subsequent 31-page dossier revealed attempts to prevent the former Duke of York from being offered “golfing functions” overseas, and noted his preference for “ballet rather than the theatre”. It also showed the late Queen pressed for him to be given the role, which, apparently, no one else was considered for.
Andrew was arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office, interviewed under caution, and remains under investigation.
The King’s tax return
The King has also released some tax information. He paid £12.9m in 2024/25…and there wasn’t much more information beyond that.
His aides say the decision is part of a wider drive to be more open with the public.
Tax campaigner Dan Neidle described the limited information shared as a “sideshow”, saying there was no transparency because nothing was verifiable.
The problem with voluntary transparency is it leaves the decision about what information is important to know to those in charge of the information.
It tends to only last as long as enthusiasm for it lasts. That tends to disappear when things involved are awkward or embarrassing. It gets forgotten when there’s a change of leadership.
The whole point of Freedom of Information is it allows people to ask about the things they’re interested in. It’s also backed by statutory powers to ensure whether to release that information is properly considered.
Sian Berry’s Bill is unlikely to go anywhere. The Government is not expected to support it, and without that it won’t move forward.
Given the Government has previously tightened FOI exemptions for Royal communication, it’s unlikely they’re going to reverse course and scrap them.
But the Bill may add to a general feeling that more Royal transparency is needed.
Missed targets
More than one in five Freedom of Information requests sent to Ealing Council last year were not answered within the legal deadline.
The figures show the council answered 77% of Freedom of Information and Environmental Information requests within the statutory 20-working-day deadline in 2025, down from 86% the previous year.
A total of 2,083 requests were received during 2025, up from 1,920 the previous year and the highest figure recorded in the report. The number of internal reviews rose from 54 in 2024 to 82 last year.
Lorraine Cox, Ealing Council’s head of information governance, said in her report: “This level of requests continues to place a significant burden on service areas in addition to their daily duties to provide a response. Requests are becoming more detailed and require significant staff time to provide a response.”
The report highlights the council’s online FOI portal, which was introduced in late 2024 to help people find answers to previous requests without submitting new ones. The council says the system received 2,607 visits last year.
However, the AI tool has been criticised as difficult to navigate. It doesn’t allow visitors to browse requests by date or category, or view a complete archive of published Freedom of Information responses.
This week’s Freedom of Information stories…
Councillor complaints
Not a successful FOI request, although for upheld complaints there may be public interest arguments for releasing the information. But if this is a wider trend, other councils may be facing rising costs to deal with complaints.
Basildon Council is facing a rising issue of councillor conduct after a “significant number” of complaints were lodged against its councillors.
Analysis of the figures has found that since September 26 last year, there have been 22 active cases under investigation. All of them are connected to allegations about the behaviour of elected individuals who serve on the council, which has gained a reputation for heated debates and conflict between officials and members of the public in the gallery.
EssexLive recently tried to obtain, through a Freedom of Information request, a breakdown per councillor of cases upheld, what they related to and any subsequent punishment. But Basildon Council refused to release this information on its elected officials, saying it was “confidential”.
But a council document seen by EssexLive states that cases requiring investigation will incur a financial cost between £5,000 and £10,000, depending on their complexity, paid for by the taxpayer.
The issue was identified by the council’s external auditors as “an area of risk requiring urgent attention” back in February. It reflected that the authority was holding “high levels of member complaints”.
Mental health help
Two thirds of people attempting to access urgent mental health support are not admitted to hospital, and waiting times for support in half of Scottish health boards can be more than three years, an investigation by The Ferret has found.
The new 2025 figures – shared with The Ferret, and released under freedom of information (FoI) law – show 66 per cent of people seeking urgent mental health support from Scottish A&E are not admitted.
Planning delays
Communities in rural Wales are waiting years, and in some cases decades, for planning permission to build homes and invest in their businesses, with some live applications still unresolved from 2005.
In some areas, only one in five applications are decided on time, with councils falling far short of government benchmarks. Councils are sitting on large backlogs, including one authority with 472 applications still awaiting a decision.
Private healthcare
The number of patients admitted to NHS hospitals directly from or immediately after treatment at a private facility has risen substantially in recent years, figures show.
There have been at least 293 such cases over the last five years, according to data released via freedom of information (FOI) requests. These rose from 30 in 2021 to 72 last year.
Crash hotspots
New data, obtained by the Yorkshire Evening Post through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted to Leeds City Council, has revealed the most dangerous roads and junctions in Leeds with the biggest number of collisions.
The city’s Regent Street – York Road flyover to Skinner Lane was named as the worst junction in Leeds.
To calculate the danger, the council used a ‘Rate/ 100 MVK’ measurement – the number of collisions per 100,000,000 vehicles travelling 1 kilometre on that particular road. It said the metric was used “to get a fairer comparison between roads of different lengths, carrying different volumes of traffic”.
New cameras
Council chiefs have responded after the appearance of several new cameras in car parks around Atherton and Tyldesley.
In a response to a freedom of information request from resident Amanda Coleman, Wigan Council said the £108,000 cameras had been installed as an ‘information gathering exercise.’
Wigan Council stated the cameras were installed to ‘gain a better understanding of the existing pedestrian, cyclist, and vehicle movements, and parking within the town centres.’
Road resurfacing
Since April 2021, the total number of roads replaced across the Bury wards is 168, new data reveals.
A resurfacing is when a council replaces the full road surface, rather than filling in potholes with materials such as asphalt.
The data, obtained by a Bury Times Freedom of Information (FOI) request, shows that, from April 2021 to the end of the first quarter of 2026, the Bury East ward had the most roads resurfaced.
It had 15 roads replaced in this period, followed closely by Elton, Moorside, and Ramsbottom, which have all had 14 resurfaced.
Blocked paths
Over 2,000 spots along Herefordshire’s network of public footpaths and byways are restricted or impassable – around one every mile, the county council has revealed.
A Herefordshire Council spokesperson said that as of the start of this month, “there are 1,172 public rights of way (PROW) enquiries still waiting to be checked in Herefordshire by our dedicated team of inspectors”.
A further 428 cases “are recorded as problems but have not yet been fixed”, while 455 jobs “have been raised but are still not completed”, they said.
This contrasts with a recent Freedom of Information (FOI) response by the council, which said just 271 PROW enquiries “remain unaddressed and uninspected”, while 92 “have been classified as defects but not yet rectified”.
Dog thefts
A study was carried out by analysing recorded crimes involving the theft or abduction of a dog between January 2021 and December 2025 across three of Britain’s biggest police forces to establish how many reported cases ended up in a suspect being charged.
But the Freedom of Information request to West Yorkshire, West Midlands, and Merseyside police forces – regions that are home to an estimated one million pet dogs – found that of 1,111 total stolen dog cases, just seven resulted in a charge or court summons.
Tree planting
London is, technically, a forest. At least, based on a UN definition that a forest is “land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 metres and a canopy cover of more than 10 per cent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ”.
While large existing sites such as Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park contribute to this status, a push to rewild London has seen at least 553,621 trees planted by London’s councils since 2019.
Enfield leads the way in tree planting according to data obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests by the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS). The North London council has planted 129,389 trees since it declared a climate emergency in summer 2019.
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