Housing associations in England aren’t covered by Freedom of Information.
Jump to this week’s Freedom of Information stories…
They’re set to be covered by a ‘sort of’ FOI regime, the Social Tenant Access to Information Requirements (STAIRs). From April 1 next year, tenants will be able to make requests for information from their housing provider.
As of yesterday (October 1), housing associations will also need a publication scheme. They’ll need to publish information on things like spending, maintenance work and evictions.
This one might be useful for non-tenants as well. Publishing the information on the main housing association website is a straight-forward way to meet the requirements. Quite a bit of this information was probably already on there. It may now just be better labelled and easier to find.
Scotland extended FOI to registered social landlords and many of their subsidiaries on November 11, 2019. It applies to their activities relating to homelessness and social housing, but not to management of any private accommodation.
Lessons from Scottish housing associations to England ahead of information requests starting are ones that are relevant to all FOI. Train staff to deal with requests, publish information tenants are likely to want, keep good records.
Freedom of Information excellence
George Greenwood from The Times is looking for the missing FOI ‘centre of excellence’.
Maybe less missing and more elusive.
After the Cabinet Office’s Clearing House was accused of blacklisting journalists, blocking the release of politically sensitive data, and generally making FOI requests more difficult, the plan was to replace it with a ‘centre for excellence’.
It would more clearly operate as an advisory function, and to be more transparent about what it’s doing. So, based on George’s investigations, how’s that working out?
The first FOI request went nowhere as there was no team or function specifically called the ‘centre for excellence’. This feels like classic FOI splitting hairs, where something is generally known as something but not technically actually named that.
A second FOI about the FOI policy unit was refused on cost grounds. A further slimmed down request found the unit is made up of three people, but doesn’t hold any guidance on how to handle requests, beyond public guidelines on the type of requests that might be referred.
The other published guidance for the unit on Round Robin requests says departments should keep only the most recent version of the circulated list of such requests with any advice/guidance and delete older ones. So previous advice is unlikely to be held.
All much more transparent than it used to be.
This week’s Freedom of Information stories…
Homelessness deaths
Prime minister Andy Burnham has been warned that moving rough sleepers off the streets alone is not enough to save lives after new statistics revealed 1,720 people died while homeless in 2025.
Museum of Homelessness’ (MOH) annual Dying Homeless project found a 6.8% rise in the number of people dying on the streets and in emergency and temporary accommodation across the UK with 50 children among the death toll.
Organisers warned the count – made up of freedom of information requests as well as deaths reported through memorial services, bereaved families, frontline workers and local media reports – is likely a significant underestimate.
Missed school
Appalled at the number of children out of school, the Central Bedfordshire SEND Action Group have catalogued Ombudsman findings, the fines levied, and the decisions made about complaints spanning a period of 2-and-a-half years.
Between February 2024 and May 2026, the Ombudsman upheld 27 separate complaints against Central Bedfordshire Council regarding special educational needs and alternative provision. It awarded families over £37,800 in compensation.
The group also used Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the council and local NHS trusts to see how big the problem is. The responses showed:
- 448 children are currently on part-time timetables in Central Bedfordshire. Crucially, 275 of them (61%) hold an active EHCP.
- 706 pupils are severely absent (attending less than 50% of school). Of those, 52 children were refused an EHC Needs Assessment by council panels.
- 230 children with identified SEND were deregistered into Elective Home Education between January 2025 and May 2026.
- 4,659 children are waiting for a first appointment at local Child Development Centres, with average waits between 68 and 78 weeks – and the longest wait stretching to an astonishing 157 weeks (over three years).
Relationship abuse
Teenagers experiencing abuse in their intimate relationships face a “postcode lottery” of support, a charity has warned.
According to a report by The Children’s Society, only a patchwork response for young victims and survivors is currently offered. This is due to inconsistent data, difficulties identifying abuse and a shortage of services designed specifically for teenagers.
Fewer than a third of local authorities that responded to a freedom of information request by the charity said they collected data on the number of teenagers experiencing relationship abuse.
Crime on buses
Sex crimes on Birmingham buses increased sharply by 25 per cent last year, new police data shows.
West Midlands Police recorded 79 sex offences on city buses in 2025, up from 63 in 2024.
The new figures, obtained exclusively by BirminghamLive through a Freedom of Information request, also showed women accounted for 106 of the 142 victims – three-quarters – recorded across the two years.
No arrests
More than half a million faces were scanned between February and July this year in some of the capital’s busiest railway stations during the British Transport Police (BTP) six-month trial of live facial recognition, which aimed to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders.
A freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates and shared with the Guardian shows that equipment hire and police staffing for the 18 deployments across the trial cost £320,786 and led to only one alert on a watchlist, which turned out to be an incorrect identification, also known as a false positive.
Children’s data
Sensitive information relating to Norfolk children was breached nearly 1,000 times in the past four years, new figures have revealed.
Norfolk County Council recorded 923 data breaches in its Children’s Services department between 2022 and 2025.
The figures, revealed via Freedom of Information request, show little improvement on the number of breaches between 2016 and 2021.
The last four years averaged 230 breaches a year, only a slight decline from 245 a year in the previous five-year period.
Knife crime
Almost 100 knife-related crimes have been reported in schools and education settings across Worcestershire this decade.
Between April 2020 and March 2026, West Mercia Police recorded 96 offences involving knives or sharp instruments on school premises in the county.
The most common offence was possession of a bladed article on school grounds, with 35 reports. This was followed by 10 incidents of threatening someone with a blade or sharply pointed object on school premises.
The data, revealed in a Freedom of Information request made by the Worcester News, has prompted reactions from top education and policing officials.
Costly fires
Three major fires which have broken out at a Belfast scrapyard site have cost the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service more than £170,000 to tackle.
The repeated blazes at the Clearway Disposals site in the city’s docklands area have been attended by dozens of firefighters and taken several days to extinguish.
The site has seen two major blazes this year in addition to a previous large fire attended by NIFRS in 2021.
A response to a Freedom of Information request by The Irish News from the NIFRS said the total cost of tackling the fires has been £171,887. The costs include staff costs, overtime and estimated fuel costs to the fire service.
Minimum fares
Scotrail introduced a £10 minimum fare this summer for passengers who could have bought a ticket before boarding but failed to do so.
New figures obtained by The National under a Freedom of Information request reveal the scale of the scheme’s impact in its first weeks of operation.
Ticketless arrivals at gated stations stood at 1.80% between July 19 and August 3, compared with an average of 3.53% during 2025/26 – a fall of almost half.
Internal figures show ScotRail estimates the policy had generated or protected £403,166 in additional revenue by August 3.
Re-selling
Electric motorbikes seized by police forces in the UK are being sold on at auction, despite some fears they could end up back in the hands of criminals, the BBC can reveal.
Thousands are confiscated annually because they are suspected of being driven illegally, or used in a crime – most are later destroyed, but a BBC investigation has found some are sold on to members of the public in online auctions.
Across the UK, police sold 161 e-bikes and e-motorcycles last year and 54 in 2024, although the real number could be higher because not every force responded to the BBC’s Freedom of Information request.
Occupational therapy
Patients in Scotland are waiting more than two years for occupational therapy assessments, figures show.
Freedom of information requests submitted by the Scottish Liberal Democrats revealed the longest occupational therapy waits in every council area last year, with patients in the Highlands waiting up to 847 days.
Other regions with long waits included Glasgow (767 days), Edinburgh (697), Perth and Kinross (645), Argyll and Bute (630), Midlothian (592), Falkirk (581), Fife (458) and North Lanarkshire (431).
Pension fraud
Two pension savers in England and Wales lost more than £400,000 each to scams in 2025/26, according to data obtained from the City of London Police through a freedom of information (FOI) request.
The FOI, submitted by Identomat, found that 242 pension savers reported pension scams during the year, with total reported losses reaching approximately £7.7m.
Average losses across all reported cases stood at £31,835. While most victims lost less than £10,000, 19 people reported losses of more than £100,000 each.
Stolen vans
A Freedom of Information (FOI) request made to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) reveals that the omnipresent Transit accounts for more than one in two vans stolen.
Indeed, the Ford Transit topped the list of the UK’s most-stolen vans in 2024 and 2025 – and between January and July 2026.
Of the 26,115 van thefts reported during that period, some 13,731 were either the Ford Transit in Custom or full-size guises: equivalent to 52.58 percent of stolen vans.
During this year alone, of the 5,137 light commercial vehicles stolen in the UK, the Transit accounts for more than half (54 percent), with 2,778 thefts so far.
Remote working
Nearly a quarter of Herefordshire Council staff work remotely from elsewhere in the country, it has been revealed.
In response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, the council said information was “not held” on how many, and what proportion, of its workforce currently works partly or wholly from home.
But when asked how many of its remote workers live outside of Herefordshire, but within the UK, it gave the figure of 391. The council added it has no employees based outside of the UK.
Thames Valley Police refused a similar request about staff asking to work from abroad, citing risks to cyber-security if it revealed information relating to remote access arrangements.
Hoax calls
The number of hoax and malicious 999 calls recorded by Cumbria Police has almost doubled in the past five years, according to new figures released under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
Data obtained by the Newsquest Cumbria shows officers recorded 137 incidents classed as “hoax calls to emergency services” in 2021.
That figure rose to 273 in 2025, the highest annual total in the period covered by the request.
Weeds
Over five years, people in Cornwall made more complaints to their council about invasive weeds than anywhere else in Britain, and one plant accounts for almost all of them.
The figures come from Freedom of Information requests sent to councils across the UK by invasive weed removal specialists Environment Controls. The company asked for complaints about four invasive plants (Japanese knotweed, Giant hogweed, bamboo and Himalayan balsam) logged between 2021 and 2025.
Cornwall Council came out on top with 633 complaints. Surrey was second with 546, and North Lanarkshire third with 517.
Driving and phoning
Thousands of drivers across Norfolk have been caught using mobile phones at the wheel in just three years.
A total of 3,571 offences were recorded by Norfolk Constabulary between 2023 and 2025, according to figures released by Marshall Motor Group following a Freedom of Information request.
The data also revealed the areas with the highest number of recorded offences. Bracondale in Norwich topped the list with 674 incidents, followed by the Southern Bypass with 174 and Earlham Road with 154.
Bridge closure
London’s Waterloo Bridge is heading toward closure within three to four years unless vital repairs are carried out, the latest sign of how ageing infrastructure risks shutting down another key artery into the capital.
An inspection of the bridge, which links the South Bank and London’s West End, found water damage and cracks as wide as 2 millimeters (0.08 inches), Westminster City Council said in a funding-bid document which Bloomberg obtained in response to a Freedom of Information request. The width of the crack is enough to raise concern depending on its location and depth on a structure.
Outdoor ads
2026 is on course to be Bristol’s busiest planning application year for outdoor advertisements and signage in recent years.
Bristol City Council was flooded with 99 applications in the first seven months of 2026, 11 per cent ahead of the same point in 2025, according to data disclosed following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Bristol24/7.
Lack of parking income
New figures obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request have raised questions over whether North Berwick’s recently introduced parking scheme is performing in line with the financial forecast presented to East Lothian councillors.
The financial model approved by councillors forecast annual income of £928,375 from on and off-street parking charges.
However, actual parking income for June, July and August totalled approximately £137,199 – just 14.8 per cent of the annual forecast.
Rude road names
A Freedom of Information (FoI) request submitted to Sheffield City Council revealed highways teams have attended Pool Square eight times since Amey took the contract in 2012 to repair the road name plate due to the missing ‘L’.
It said that Amey teams have also attended a further two times to repair reported damage to the road name plate which “may or may not include damage caused to the ‘L’.”
Amey took the Highway Maintenance Contract contract in 2012, meaning over the last 14 years, each year comes with a 57% chance of the ‘L’ needing a freshen up. Taking an average, statistically the ‘L’ is safe for an average of 639 days or 21 months.
Photo by Charles A. Pickup on Pexels
