Public authorities, including government departments, are consistently failing to answer Freedom of Information requests within the legal time limit, new research by openDemocracy has revealed.
We painstakingly analysed 6,000 rulings issued by the FOI watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), between 2021 and 2023 – finding that almost a quarter related to public authorities’ failure to hit the 20-working day deadline.
The findings are made as part of openDemocracy’s extensive new report on FOI, Transparency Under Threat: Monitoring FOI compliance in the UK, which is published today.
