Since 2005, the Freedom of Information Act has given any person, of any nationality, for any reason, the right to demand recorded information from UK public bodies, and roughly a hundred thousand organisations are covered: government departments, councils, NHS trusts, police forces, state schools, universities and more. Requests are free, need no special form, and are answerable within twenty working days. A remarkable share of investigative journalism, from hospital infection rates to pothole payouts to ministers' calendars, begins with someone simply asking.
The right has real edges. It covers recorded information held at the time of the request, not answers to questions the body would have to research, and not opinions, explanations or predictions. It sits alongside a sibling regime for environmental information, which is broader in some ways, and personal data about yourself travels under data protection law instead.
Refusals come through two lawful doors. The first is the cost limit: if compliance would exceed a set number of staff hours, the body may decline, which is why sprawling requests fail where surgical ones succeed. The second is the exemptions, some absolute, security bodies, court records, and many qualified, meaning the body must weigh the public interest before withholding: policy formulation, commercial interests, legal privilege, personal data of others. Qualified exemptions are where the arguing happens, and requesters win a meaningful share of the arguments.
The gap between law and practice
Anyone who uses the Act regularly learns its unofficial features. Deadlines slip, public-interest extensions stretch, and some bodies treat requests from journalists with a wariness the law does not permit, since the Act is applicant-blind in principle. Information is sometimes pushed into channels the Act reaches poorly, and the regulator has had to remind departments that WhatsApp messages about official business are still official records. The oversight mechanism, complaint to the Information Commissioner and appeal to a tribunal, works and is free, but its timescales reward institutional patience.
Good requests defeat most of this by design. Ask for named documents, reports, datasets or correspondence within a defined period, not for everything about a topic. Split large questions into separate requests. Cite the section 16 duty to advise and assist when a request is rejected as too broad, and ask what would fit inside the cost limit. Request internal review promptly on refusal, then escalate; boilerplate exemption claims frequently collapse when a regulator asks the body to justify them.
Governments of every stripe have grumbled about the Act, which is a reasonable sign of its function. It remains one of the few instruments through which a citizen can compel the state to produce its own paperwork, and it works best for the people who treat it as a precision tool rather than a megaphone.
