What percentage of FOI requests are made using WhatDoTheyKnow?

The volunteer team behind our Freedom of Information (FOI) site WhatDoTheyKnow.com, has used statistics released by the Ministry of Justice to discover the proportion of all FOI requests being made via the site.

They found that in the first quarter of 2009, 8.5% of all requests made to central government departments were made using WhatDoTheyKnow. In absolute terms that was 514 of 6019 requests.

The breakdown by department is given in the below table. Notably, one in five FOI requests to the Home Office (122 of 643) were made via WhatDoTheyKnow.

Department Total FOI Requests Requests Via WDTK WDTK Share
Home Office 643 122 19.0%
Department for Children, Schools and Families 217 27 12.4%
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 131 16 12.2%
Department of Health 423 40 9.5%
Ministry of Defence 758 70 9.2%
Foreign and Commonwealth Office 281 25 8.9%
Communities and Local Government 204 18 8.8%
Cabinet Office 274 23 8.4%
Department for Transport 586 41 7.0%
Department for Work and Pensions 533 34 6.4%
HM Treasury 446 27 6.1%
Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform 216 12 5.6%
Department of Energy and Climate Change 55 3 5.5%
Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills 74 4 5.4%
Attorney General’s Office 19 1 5.3%
Ministry of Justice 757 38 5.0%
Department for International Development 80 4 5.0%
Scotland Office 58 2 3.4%
Department for Culture, Media and Sport 176 6 3.4%
Northern Ireland Office 65 1 1.5%
Export Credits Guarantee Department 9 0 0.0%
Wales Office 14 0 0.0%
Q1 2009 Totals 6019 514 8.5%

WDTK = WhatDoTheyKnow; Source for total FOI request statistics : Statistics for Q1 2009 (released on the 25th of June 2009); Extended table covering all monitored bodies available.

The Ministry of Justice only monitors, and provides statistics on, 44 bodies’ compliance with the Freedom of Information Act; WhatDoTheyKnow currently lists 2910. We cover a wide range of local bodies including Primary Care Trusts, Local Councils and the Police. There is no national monitoring of how many FOI requests are made to such bodies, or how well they perform when responding to requests.

If you want to see such performance statistics, please help categorise more of the responses made via the site. It can be quite addictive!

Thanks to Richard Taylor for doing this research – see his blog post for some more details, including some information about Scotland.