Using your information rights for journalism - transcript

Welcome to this presentation for using your information rights for journalism.

We're going to talk about some headline facts, some examples of ways you might use your right to access information, some common myths about Freedom of Information or FOI, some best practise guidance on making information requests, and what you can do if you're unhappy with the response that you receive.

We're going to start with the five WS, what, who, where, when and why.

You have the right to request recorded information.

These information rights come from the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, and the Environmental Information Regulations or EIR. EIR only covers information about the environment, but that definition can be broad.

People often say FOI to cover both.

You should also note that data protection legislation provides you with some information rights regarding your personal data.

Now, we're not going to talk about that in depth during this presentation, but it will be touched on.

Information requests should be made in writing.

In most cases, you should receive a response to your request within 20 working days.

Now, your right to access information is not absolute.

Some information can and will be withheld and there's also a cost or time limit which applies to finding or retrieving the information that you've requested, and that time limit is usually 18 hours.

Sometimes organisations will respond to you late, unfortunately.

They should definitely acknowledge your request and keep you informed if they know that they're going to be late.

Anyone can use these rights and you can make information requests to public bodies, also known as public authorities.

There's more detail on the definition of a public authority on the next slide.

So as well as you and public authorities, there's also a third party involved, which is us, the ICO, or the Information Commissioner's Office.

We're the independent regulator for FOIA and the EIR, and we also regulate data protection and some other laws.

Our website is www.ico.org.uk.

Public authorities include government departments, local authorities, the NHS, state schools and police forces.

However, the act does not necessarily cover every organisation that receives public money.

For example, it does not cover some charities that receive grants and certain private sector organisations that perform public functions.

So in general it's organisations that receive public funding, but you should be aware that EIR, the Environmental Information Regulations, cover more organisations if they carry out functions of public administration or their operations directly impact the environment.

The quote on this slide is from the IC OS website guidance.

We've got loads of guidance on the site, mostly aimed at organisations, but there is also guidance for people making requests.

We also have training videos for organisations and various tools we've developed to try and make it easier for them to comply with the law.

And it's all free.

We're talking about the law as it stands in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Scotland has its own Freedom of Information law and its own commissioner.

Many countries have these laws and the good practise information we're going to give you here is likely to apply broadly in those countries as well.

FOI has been around since 2005, which means there were 20 years of case law and other useful examples which are incorporated into the ICO’s

Free guidance.

The ICO has two roles.

As well as providing guidance, we also handle complaints that people make if they're not happy with responses that they've received to information requests.

So we make a decision on how the request has been handled based on these two decades of experience and precedent that we have.

And then we issue a decision notice which might agree with the public authority or might agree with you, the requester.

Transparency, accountability, democratic participation and economic growth are some of the main benefits of Freedom of Information.

So transparency allows us to understand what organisations are doing with our money.

The ability to ask for information about decisions and their results increases accountability.

And these two things together lead to a better informed, more engaged public equipped better to participate in democracy.

And the disclosure of information can spur economic growth in many ways, including the sales of newspapers, subscriptions to news platforms or monetizable followers on social media.

More than 20 years ago, at the second reading of the FOI Bill, the then Home Secretary Jack Straw said unnecessary secrecy in government and our public services has long been held to undermine good governance and public administration.

The bill, by its first clause, lays down for the first time in our constitutional history that the public have a right to know about the work of government and all of the public authorities.

It will help to transform the culture of government from one

Of secrecy to one of openness.

It will transform the default setting from This should be kept quiet unless to This should be published unless.

Now we're going to look at some real life examples of journalists using their information rights and FOI disclosures leading to news stories.

Here's the headline from the Southern Daily Echo.

Authorities slammed as no fines issued for blank.

Now with the reduction removed, we can see that the full headline reads.

Authorities slammed as no fines issued for celebrities touching ponies.

This is an example of a journalist using FOI to look for statistical information, In this case, the amount of fines issued under a specific piece of legislation, to add further context to an issue that had already received coverage earlier in this case.

The article was a follow up to earlier stories about a reality TV personality taking a picture of themselves hugging A protected pony and posting the photo on Instagram despite PSPOs, or Public Space Protection Orders, being in place.

Here's another headline, this time from the BBC.

Millions of blanks seized in illegal trade crackdown.

And with the redaction removed we can see that that reads Millions of vapes seized in illegal trade crackdown.

Now this is an example of using FOI to ask a number of different organisations with the same duties, in this instance local trading standards teams, to provide the same type of information, and we'll see more detail on that on the next slide.

So that allows the journalists to collate a big picture headline and add context to a broader story.

Here are some excerpts from that BBC story about illegal vapes.

So you can see they sent Freedom of Information requests to 136 local trading standard bodies and received responses from 133.

And those responses allowed them to put together a larger statistical picture showing the total of vape products seized and records of retailers selling vapes to children.

All of these facts and figures are derived from this work using FOI.

There are some subjects that journalists can return to year after year using FOI to get refreshed annual figures.

So in this case we can see that the subject is the amount of people who fall through the gap at tube stations, Despite that iconic warning that's played every time you get off the train.

So this first example from my London was published in 2025.

The next example on the slide was published in 2016 and the bottom example from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism was published in 2011.

This is the final headline in this section of the presentation and it concerns one of the three PS.

These are three things all beginning with P, which always generate a lot of requests, so - Lincs online -

Freedom of Information requests to Lincolnshire and Rutland County councils reveal the most expensive blanks.

Well done if you guessed potholes.

Potholes, parking and planning result in lots of FOI requests from private individuals as well as journalists.

So this is an example of a type of FOI use which can be hyperlocal and creates a kind of story which could be repeated every year and still be interesting, or at least not any less interesting to people in the local area.

Using your information rights can take some time, so you need to be mindful of that when you're considering deadlines.

Journalists have said that they often receive responses to their requests on the last possible day of the 20 working days.

In some specific instances, the response time can be extended if the organisation needs to consider the public interest in disclosing information or withholding the information.

And if information isn't disclosed to you and you think that's wrong, you can appeal in various ways, but that also takes time.

Now we're going to look at some common myths about FOI.

These are based on questions that we've been asked in various webinars or Q&A's about using FOI for journalism or for other research purposes.

Myth #1 FOI is the same thing as a subject access request.

Now you may have heard of SARS or D SARS.

A SAR is a request for a copy of information which is just about you as an individual, your personal data.

You can make a SAR to any organisation, including private companies if they hold information about you.

Whereas FOI allows you to ask a public authority to disclose copies of recorded information to the general public, IE you.

If you want to know more about SARS, the ICO also regulates the data protection legislation which gives you the right to make one.

So there's lots of information on our website about that right. Myth #2: they won't give that kind of information to me.

Well, as we've said, anyone can make a request.

It doesn't matter if you're a student, someone using the act for professional purposes, or just an interested individual.

Information requests should be handled in an applicant blind way.

This means that anyone making the same request in the same circumstances would receive the same quality of response with the same amount of information disclosed.

When a public authority receives an information request from a journalist, it makes sense that they might want to discuss the request with their comms team or their press team to prepare for any media coverage if the issue at hand is particularly sensitive.

And that might not happen if someone who makes a request isn't a journalist, provided that the response received by the journalist and the non-journalist are of the same quality with the same volume of information disclosed.

That doesn't go against applicant blindness.

For your request to be valid, you need to provide a name and a correspondence address.

Correspondence address is usually just an e-mail address, including a work e-mail address, but it can be a postal address or even a social media handle.

If you use a social media handle, usually the authority will disclose the information on their website and then send you a link to it.

Public authorities can and will challenge obvious pseudonyms.

Myth #3 this is confusing and I'm on my own.

Well, firstly, organisations are required to give you advice and assistance to make a request.

So if you can't work out how to submit the request, you can't find the e-mail address or their online form, or you need clarification on something before you submit it in order to make the most effective request, or you've sent a request to them and there's something in the response that doesn't make sense that you want to clarify, you should ask them to explain.

Ask the authority to give you advice and assistance.

Additionally, lots of people use these rights every day and you can look at what other people are doing.

There's a website called Whatdotheyknow com which is an open platform for making FOI requests.

You can use it to make requests yourself, but you can also use it to see how other people ask what they're asking for and the results that they receive.

Myth #4 I have to ask for a specific document.

You don't have to ask for a specific document by name.

You can describe the document if you don't know its title, or give a
general description of the type of information you're after and where you think it might be found.

You can ask for small pieces of information excerpted out of larger documents, or sequences of information from different sources if they're held by the organisation.

But you can't use FOI or EIR to make the organisation create brand new information for you.

The rights only apply to recorded information that they hold.

Myth #5 If it's in my private interests to receive the information, it's not in the public interest.

The public interest is an important part of FOI and EIR, and it plays a big role in decisions made around whether information should or should not be disclosed.

Sometimes people think that commercial use of the act, in this case journalistic, is not in the public interest because the requester, you, are only making the request in order to use the information for your own gain.

But the legislation doesn't say that.

Private interests and the public interest aren’t mutually exclusive, and journalism is central to the kind of transparency that the act is set up to engender and support.

Myth #6 - There's no point complaining.

Hopefully when you make an information request you'll receive everything you need.

Usually the public authority should at least provide you with a response which confirms if they hold the information you've asked for, unless there's a very good reason for them to neither confirm nor deny that, and the response should set out why any withheld information has been withheld.

The response should also set out your next steps if you're unhappy.

There are often reasonable grounds for the organisation to withhold some or all of the information you asked for, but you can't challenge that.

If the response doesn't seem justified #1 ask the organisation to perform an internal review of their decision.

#2 If that doesn't resolve the matter, complain to the ICO.

And three, if you're not happy with our decision, you can then appeal to the Information Rights Tribunal.

All of this takes time, but it's worth doing if the information is important to you and you feel that your rights are not being respected.

Now we're going to provide some advice on making effective requests.

Effective requests make the best use of your time, maximise the chance of getting an efficient response from the organisation and also protect the limited resources of public authorities.

There's lots of information that's already publicly available and finding something yourself is quicker than asking for it and waiting for a response.

Search engines and AI search are very useful, but remember to double check sources and accuracy if you're using AI generated material.

Maybe the information you want is already available through a central body like the National Archives or the ONS.

Maybe it's already been published on the website of the organisation you're interested in.

Public authorities are required to publish quite a lot of information.

Search their website for their publication scheme or guide to information.

Publication scheme should include information about policies and procedures, minutes of meetings, annual reports and financial information.

So if you're looking for that kind of stuff, that's a good place to start.

As we've already mentioned, people use their information rights every day.

And that means that many public authorities have what are called disclosure logs, which are lists of previous requests that they've received and the responses that they issue to them.

And whatdotheyknow.com, which again, we mentioned earlier, hosts more than a million historic requests.

It's a kind of open public disclosure log for thousands of different public authorities.

It's searchable by public authority and also by request topic.

The ICO is not formally connected to.

What do they know

They're one of our critical friends who help us by providing us with information and opinions about the way that FOI and EIR are being used.

As you'll see when you visit their website, they offer a paid pro version of their service specifically for journalists.

We're not endorsing or advertising it, we're just noting that it exists and you will see it if you go on the website.

So if you look, are there responses already issued to questions that people have already asked?

You might well find what you're looking for, but if not, the research that you've done up to this point will give you lots of useful information for framing your request.

The time that you spend looking for information that's already been published and checking the responses that have already been issued to requests should help give you an idea of the kind of terminology the organisation uses when it talks about its own information, and might give you a sense of what they hold and how they hold it.

That will all help you construct a request that they can easily engage with.

When you come to writing the request, be concise.

If you want information from a specific time period, be clear about that time period.

If the terms you're using could be open to interpretation, define them.

Give your version of what you mean by that.

Sometimes phrases which are very clear and obvious to you can actually be very ambiguous to the organisation.

It's their job to come back and ask you for clarification on that, but you can do some work ahead of time to try and avoid it.

If you're happy to receive summarised information, explain that as well.

If an organisation does have to come back to you for clarification, the 20 working day limit that they have to respond doesn't start until you've provided that clarification.

You should also be aware that just making a blanket request and asking for everything that they hold on a specific subject is not likely to get you the quickest response and may well exceed that cost limit time limit that we mentioned at the very start of the presentation, or just be refused outright as burdensome.

If you're planning to go to multiple different organisations to ask them to provide you with similar pieces of information so you can carry out some comparison, think now about how you're going to gather those responses and analyse them.

For example, if you're going to put them in a spreadsheet, it might be worth providing a grid to the organisation to show them your desired format.

That will then allow you to just copy and paste responses into your master spreadsheet.

Be aware that organisations aren't required to use that specific format as long as they provide you with the information you've requested in the overall document form you've requested, I.E. a .csv, unless it proves unreasonable for them to provide it in that form.

This is a nuance of the law, but if you frame it in a positive way and make it easy for them to comply with your request, we would hope the organisations would be helpful to you.

If you're going to make a lot of use out of FOI and are making the same requests over and over again, all the same types of requests, it might be worth using your own templates to speed up the process.

And there are some basic templates on the ICO website to help you make a request and also to help you ask for an internal review if necessary.

If you're going to make regular requests to the same organisation, it's useful to try and build a relationship with the FOI team there.

Now that shouldn't mean that you get a better response, but it might make it more efficient when they need to ask you to clarify your request.

And it might help conversations that you have with them about your information needs and how they can best meet them.

Build a relationship with their press office as well.

If you need information on a short deadline, you're probably going to want to go to the press office 1st and they may be able to deal with it as
a normal course of business request rather than turning it into an FOI request which will then attract that 20 working day deadline.

If you find yourself dealing with both press and info access teams a lot at the same organisation, try to make it clear when you are making a formal FOI request and when you are merely making a press inquiry.

This will help to avoid confusion.

The information on this slide is based off feedback we've had from practitioners over many years.

People can get very heated about FOI and EIR requests, but even if you're making requests about something embarrassing or damaging for the public authority, or you already have a fixed opinion about them, criticising them in your information request isn't going to achieve anything.

If you think that they've made an incorrect decision in refusing a request or withholding information, you can explain that without getting personal. Officers or practitioners dealing with your request are not usually the person who made the final decision on whether or not information should be disclosed.

That probably was left to a subject matter expert in the organisation.

Taking your frustrations out on these frontline staff doesn't achieve anything.

If you're making multiple information requests, use a spreadsheet to track them so you know when to expect your response, when to chase a response if it hasn't arrived, when to expect a response to an internal review, and when to complain to the ICO.

Keep a record of your correspondence.

If you need to complain to us, we'll need to see that paperwork.

As we've already mentioned, it's not always in the public interest for information to be disclosed.

There are lots of exemptions, which is the FOI terminology, and exceptions, which is the EIR terminology, which allow organisations to withhold information from the public.

Each one of those serves a specific purpose.

The public authority should explain why they're withholding the information.

The overview that we're going to give now will focus on FOI exemptions, but detailed guidance on EIR exceptions is available on our website.

If information has already been published somewhere and is reasonably available to the public, then the organisation should direct you to that information, but it doesn't need to actively provide you with a copy in response to your request.

It wouldn't be a good use of public money if the information isn't published yet, but they intend to publish the information soon.

Again, it's not a good use of public money for them to provide it to you ahead of that planned publication date.

Data protection legislation, which as we've already mentioned, the ICO also regulates, sets out strong protections for individuals, personal data, and that's reflected in FOI and the EIR.

So if you're asking for information about a specific individual, the disclosure of that information is likely to rest on their public profile, seniority and other relevant factors.

We've all heard about confidentiality.

For FOI, confidentiality means something specific, it doesn't just mean secret or sensitive.

There is detailed ICO guidance on this, look for section 41 on our website.

But the important thing to know is that a multi part test derived from case law can be applied to see if information actually has the quality of confidence.

So if an organisation tells you something is confidential, you can expect them to set out some reasoning based on that multi part test.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, FOI does spur economic activity.

It can help people understand procurement rules and how they work in practise, or can help companies put forward competitive bids.

And transparency leads to better understanding of public expenditure in general.

But FOI does contain safeguards to protect trade secrets in the commercial interests of organisations.

If an organisation is going to rely on this aspect of the act to withhold information from you, they need to set out how the disclosure of the information would actually or be likely to actually prejudice commercial interests.

There needs to be a causal relationship between the disclosure information and some kind of harm.

Now, we've mentioned the cost or time limit a couple of times in this presentation, and there was also mention of burdensome requests earlier.

There are two specific sections of the Act that set these things out.

Section 12 says that if handling a request would take too long, it would cost too much, and it sets a boundary on that.

The cost limit is usually expressed as 18 hours.

For some organisations, it's 24.

Organisations would need to provide a clear, cogent explanation of why it would take so long and cost so much for them to find or retrieve the information that you've requested.

On the other hand, a request can be refused as burdensome under Section 14.

It might be used as a fall back where the excessive time required to fulfil the request is due to one of the factors not set out under the specific time cost limit rules defined in Section 12.

This is very technical and the key thing to remember here is that if you receive one of these responses, you can challenge it.

Either way.

The organisation should explain clearly why the request either exceeds the cost time limit or is burdensome, and you can still appeal first to them and then to the ICO.

There are a host of other exemptions or exceptions which we don't have time to get into now, which cover things like legal professional privilege, information which would prejudice law enforcement if it was disclosed, etcetera.

And there are exemptions designed to protect the government's ability to decide on policy or conduct public affairs.

Our right to access information isn't intended on having a chilling effect on internal government discussions.

The key thing is that public authorities should explain why the exemption applies.

And when you're planning your request, think about which exemptions might apply and also think about that cost time limit that we discussed on the last slide.

You might be able to pre-empt the application of some of these exemptions by wording your request to exclude information which would likely engage those exemptions or setting out ahead of time why you think that they don't apply.

This is something that might come in when you're a bit more experienced than your use of the ACT, but it's another reason why looking at requests and responses issued to requests previously on some of those publicly available sources of information that we've outlined is very useful to pick up some of this terminology and some of the logic of the exemption.

We mentioned the public interest earlier.

Some exemptions or exceptions require the public authority to carry out what's called a public interest test.

They need to show that they've considered the balance of public interest in favour of disclosing the information against the public interest in maintaining the exemption when they're presented to you.

These tests should be clear and coherent.

You might not agree with the result of it, but you should be satisfied that it's been carried out in a fairway.

And if you're not, challenge it.

It may be useful to spend some time in advance thinking about the public interest arguments in favour of disclosure and also the public interest arguments in favour of withholding in order to challenge them.

As we've set out earlier on we looked at perennial requests.

Requests that can be made over and over again to the same organisation looking to carry out comparison or update an ongoing story.

Requests made too close together in time can be aggregated and viewed as one big request which may then take you over the time or cost limit.

Also, requests for exactly the same information can be refused, or requests which are part of a campaign against the organisation with the intent of causing disruption.

But nothing says you can't make reasonable, well-spaced requests to an organisation for updated information if you keep having to ask for the same stuff.

You might want to suggest to them that they proactively publish it.

And if you do find yourself making these recurring requests for the same information from the same organisation, it's a good opportunity to do some of that relationship building that we were talking about earlier in as much as anything, just to prep them for the fact that you're going to make that request again.

Hopefully you will find that when you make an information request, you're fully satisfied with the response, but if you're not, you will need to push back.

Now the first thing to acknowledge here is that sometimes the terminology around this legislation can be confusing.

As we've said, the public authority should explain their basis for withholding information to you and they also have that general responsibility to provide you with appropriate advice and assistance.

So you can expect some support from them in understanding their rationale for withholding information from you.

You can also consult the very detailed guidance on the ICO’s website.

That's a free resource for you.

And as mentioned earlier, you can consult the disclosure log of the organisation and or their specific WhatDoTheyKnow?

Page to see how they've structured previous responses to similar requests.

You might also be able to access previous internal review responses that they've issued so you can see what their logic is likely to be when it comes to that point.

As well as that, back to the ICO website, we have an archive of decision notices which we've issued.

So those are our official regulatory positions on requests for similar information that people have made and then they have had to bring a complaint to us and then we have issued this final decision notice.

You can read those, you can look at how we've handled those previous complaints.

One final note here is to say that if you do need to re-engage with the public authority to ask them for clarification or something, a phone call is often a really good way to request or receive that clarification.

It can be easier for people to explain these sometimes quite complex things on the phone then it can via e-mail.

So if you're unhappy with the response that you've received, you ask them to perform an internal review and then if you're not happy with the response to their internal review, you complain to the ICO.

Complain to us within six weeks of your last substantive contact with the organisation.

If you're unhappy with our decision at the end of our complaints process, you can go to the First Tier Information Rights Tribunal.

That's a free process.

You don't need legal representation to do it.

You can represent yourself.

If you're unhappy with the First Tier Information Rights Tribunal, you can seek to appeal to the Upper Tier Information Rights Tribunal, although be aware that they do not accept every appeal.

Earlier slides have been working on the basis that you will receive a response and be unhappy about that response.

But unfortunately, in some circumstances you may not receive a response at all or a very late response.

If you don't get a response from a public authority in 20 working days, follow up with them.

Remind them of the request that you've made and the fact that it is now late before you complain to us.

But do complain to us.

And if you've asked them to perform an internal review and they failed to do that within 40 working days of you requesting it, again, you can complain to the ICO.

And finally, if you make a Freedom of Information request and then get good use out of the information that's been disclosed to you, tell people how you got that information.

Help show the value of our information rights and help spread awareness of FOI.

If you request a data set, you could republish that data set or point people towards your response on the public authority's disclosure log so they can access the data set directly from the public authority.

Information disclosed to 1 requester is for the public as a whole, and maybe someone else can make good use of that information.

There are some campaign groups interested in FOI like Campaign for Freedom of Information who you can find online and there's a small but active FOI scene on LinkedIn.

There are a number of useful books on FOI and also journals which specifically focus on Freedom of Information and the EIR.

Two books that you might be particularly interested in are Freedom of Information, a Practical guide book by Martin Rosenbaum who is an ex BBC journalist, and Freedom of Information, A practical guide for UK Journalists by Matthew Burgess.

If you need support using your information rights throughout your career as a journalist, keep the ICO in mind.

We have a general inquiry service that you can access through our website.

You can feedback to this team specifically about the presentation using the e-mail address on the slide and we're also present on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.