Freedom of Information requests: a beginner's guide for UK journalists

Some of the most useful stories never arrive in a press release. A council's spending on temporary accommodation. The number of times a hospital trust has sent patients out of area. A police force's written policy on seizing phones. All of it exists in a record somewhere, and all of it can be asked for.

Freedom of Information is the least glamorous tool in a reporter's kit and often the most productive. It rewards patience and precision, and it punishes anyone who fires off a vague question and hopes for the best.

What you can actually ask for

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 covers public authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland: councils, government departments, the NHS, police forces, state schools, quangos and more. Scotland has its own regime under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, overseen by the Scottish Information Commissioner. Environmental material — pollution, planning, land use, energy — falls under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, which reach a wider set of bodies and are frequently more generous to the requester.

The crucial limit to understand is that you are asking for recorded information the body already holds. You cannot demand that somebody writes a new report, forms an opinion or explains a decision. "Why did you close the youth centre?" is a question for a press officer. "Please send the officer's report, the cabinet minutes and the equality impact assessment relating to the closure of the youth centre" is a request for records — and a far harder thing to wave away.

Drafting a request that gets answered

Most refusals are earned at the drafting stage. A loose request hands the authority an easy excuse. A tight one leaves it nowhere to hide.

• Ask for records, not for a conversation. Request documents, minutes, contracts, ledgers, emails, spreadsheets, inspection reports.
• Set a date range. "Between 1 January and 31 December 2024" prevents an authority claiming it would take too long to search its whole archive.
• Name the team or the job title. Correspondence between the head of planning and a named developer is narrower, and cheaper to retrieve, than "correspondence about the development".
• Specify the format. "As a spreadsheet, one row per case, with columns for date, category and outcome" means the data is usable the moment it lands.
• Keep each request separate. The cost limit — £450 for most authorities, £600 for central government, calculated at £25 an hour — is applied per request. Bundle five questions into one email and a single expensive one can sink the lot.
• Include your name and an address for replies. An email is fine. Without them, the request is not valid and the clock never starts.

Ask for numbers where you can

Free text is expensive to review and redact, so authorities resist it. Counts, totals and categories are cheap to produce and easy to chart. If you want to know how a complaints process is working, ask for the number of complaints received, upheld and closed within target, broken down by year and category. You will get it faster than you would get the correspondence, and it will tell you where to dig next.

Reading the refusal

Public authorities must respond promptly and in any event within 20 working days. In practice, three things happen after you send a request.

They ask for clarification. This pauses the clock, so reply the same day. Be helpful rather than indignant: narrowing the scope is often faster than arguing about it.

They refuse on cost. Ask what estimate they used and how they reached it. If the figure looks invented, say so, and offer a smaller version of the request — a shorter period, one department, a sample of files rather than all of them.

They cite an exemption. Look for the section number. Section 40 (personal data), section 43 (commercial interests), section 30 (investigations) and section 35 (policy formulation) are the usual suspects. Most exemptions are qualified, which means the authority must also show that the public interest in withholding the material outweighs the public interest in releasing it. Plenty of refusals never address that test at all, which is your opening.

Internal reviews and the ICO

Do not reply with "I disagree" and leave it there. Build a case.

1. Request an internal review in writing. Most authorities ask for this within 40 working days of their response, though some set shorter deadlines, so check what your letter actually says. Name the exemption you are challenging, explain why it does not apply, and spell out the specific public interest in disclosure: public money, safety, accountability, a previous disclosure on the same subject.
2. If the review changes nothing, complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. The ICO generally expects complaints within three months of the final response. It can order disclosure, though it moves slowly, and a decision notice is itself a document you can report on.
3. In Scotland, the route differs. You ask the authority for a review, then appeal to the Scottish Information Commissioner, with a further right of appeal to the Court of Session on a point of law.

Worth remembering: a refusal can be the story. If a body spends public money but will not say how much, or hides behind commercial confidentiality for a contract that has already been signed, the secrecy is the finding.

From response to story

A single reply from a single council is rarely enough. Ask the same question of fifty councils, or of every trust in a region, and you have a pattern. Ask for three or five years of the same figure and you have a trend. Check what you receive against published budgets, inspection reports and previous answers; inconsistencies between them are where the real reporting starts.

Then put the numbers to the body before you publish, in specific terms. Give it a fair chance to explain, and quote the explanation if it comes. If you can, publish the underlying data alongside the story — readers and other journalists will find things in it that you missed.

Making it a habit

Keep a simple log of every request: what you asked for, the date it went in, the deadline, who is handling it and its current status. Diary the 20-working-day mark and the internal review window, because both pass quietly. Send requests in batches on a slow afternoon so the replies arrive together. Where a press office will give you a figure informally, take it and file a formal request in parallel, so you have it in writing if the numbers later change.

None of this is complicated, and very little of it is legal argument. It is mostly admin, done consistently, by someone who has read the response letter properly. Do that for a year and you will have a folder of material no one else has.

This is general guidance rather than legal advice. If a contested exemption matters to a story, take it up with the ICO or a media lawyer before you publish.

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