FOI Fest skills session #2: Q&A
Do FOI requests made on WhatDoTheyKnow get better results than those made directly?
Can you make an FOI request via social media?
These and other great questions from the audience were answered by Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for FOI; journalist and FOI expert Martin Rosenbaum; and mySociety’s Gareth Rees & Julia Cushion at FOI Fest.
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Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard]: Welcome to FOI Fest 2026! Let’s start with one online, which is to you, Martin, which is, do you make requests publicly on WhatDoTheyKnow, or mostly private?
0:15 [Martin Rosenbaum]: So I always make my requests privately rather than use WhatDoTheyKnow, because I like to have my own complete personal control over the process.
0:26 I have to say, I do think WhatDoTheyKnow is a wonderful thing. It’s a great resource. I look at it all the time, and it’s very, very useful from the point of view of seeing what requests have been answered already.
0:37 Very useful often, I think, to get the right phraseology of a request – to see the phraseology, the jargon, the terminology the public authority has used itself in the past. I find it particularly useful for that reason, but when I make a request, I’ve got to say I personally am really secretive, and I just do it myself.
0:59 [Gavin]: Brilliant. Thank you. Do we have any questions in the audience? We do indeed.
1:02 [Audience member 1]: Hi, this is actually.. I’m also very secretive, so I also do them myself. But I was wondering, because I also use WhatDoTheyKnow as a kind of way of figuring out, like, like Martin, what’s already been done. It helps me shape my requests and everything, and so to give something back, I would.. Is there a way for me to then give you my requests afterwards, after I’ve had my way with them?
1:20 [Gareth Rees]: So unfortunately, not at the moment. You’ve got to have made your request on WhatDoTheyKnow for it to appear there.
1:26 The reason for this is mainly so we can prove that this request did come from an authority, not that we’ve just uploaded some, you know, random information.
1:35 You know, without it being made and the process going through WhatDoTheyKnow, we can’t really prove whether the information released or the responses were modified in any way, and just on the complete privacy point, with the privacy period, you can always keep extending that privacy period if you wish on WhatDoTheyKnow.
1:57 [Audience member 2]: So I was just curious, I’ve always wondered if you’ve seen a difference in FOI requests being filed individually versus WhatDoTheyKnow, because obviously WhatDoTheyKnow is exposed to, they know it’s being filed through WhatDoTheyKnow, so they know it’s going to be public afterwards.
2:12 And I was wondering if that has any impact on whether you’ve been filing them privately because you’re worried about that, and also the same question to the WhatDoTheyKnow team: are you aware of requests being handled differently because they’re being filed through WhatDoTheyKnow?
2:25 [Maurice Frankel]: Well, I can’t answer that directly, but a lot of people publish by WhatDoTheyKnow because they want to publicise their request and their complaint to other people.
2:34 There’s often, you know, very angry comment by the poster, and so on, and it’s impossible to see that that makes any difference, to the authority, they will just deal with a request in, I assume, the same way as they would if it came through email, individual.
2:51 [Martin]: Yeah. If I could just say, from my point of view, I’ve not really noticed that there is any particular difference. It might be the case that authorities, because it’s going to be in WhatDoTheyKnow, think, OK, we’ve got to put this bit of context in order to explain what the answer is, because we know anybody could read this.
3:06 But sometimes, if you’re a journalistic requester, they will add that kind of bit of context anyway, because they think you’re going to report it, and they want you to use that extra bit of information, so I can’t say that I have noticed a difference in that regard.
3:21 [Gareth]: We’re definitely aware of some research which suggests that requesting in public does get better responses, but yeah, I’m sure there are lots of different ways that individual public authorities might perceive a request in public versus a private request.
3:37 I think someone mentioned earlier that sometimes FOI can be seen as a little bit antagonistic, so I think some people do feel that as well. So, I think it’s a complex area.
3:47 [Audience member 3]: Yeah. Two points. So, when I was working with Consumer Association many years ago, it was very active in the Freedom of Information field.
3:57 So, simple question is, is Consumer Association still active? The second question is, the ICO says that if people are making a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act, organisations should realise that people might apply for free data protection access via social media.
4:16 In the original days, it was always letters, now it’s all emails, but do organisations actually accept Freedom of Information requests via social media?
4:27 [Martin]: Yeah, so on the second point, organisations certainly are meant to accept requests via social media, and there have been cases where the ICO has ruled that a request made via social media is a valid request.
4:42 From my point of view, it’s not a sensible way to make an FOI request, because you’ve got character limits and you can’t really explain everything in detail, and it may well easily be missed, not treated as an FOI request. So, it’s not a sensible way to make an FOI request, but it is a legal way to make an FOI request.
5:00 And I think the people who were doing it were basically doing it largely to prove a point. I don’t know the answer to the first question, Maurice, do you? [Maurice indicates ‘no’]
5:07 So the first question, information not held, is the.. I’m afraid is the response to that. [Audience chuckles]
5:12 [Audience member 4]: On disclosure logs. Is there a way that we can encourage organisations to have disclosure logs? In Norfolk, the police who were criticised by the ICO no longer have one. Our Integrated Care Board doesn’t have one. The NHS trust don’t have one. Most of the councils don’t have one that is publicly available.
5:30 [Martin]: So I thought there would be much more of a development of perhaps even a universal development of disclosure logs than there has turned out to be, and there’s been quite a few examples of authorities, actually, and the hospital in Norwich is one example of this from many years ago, having their own disclosure logs, and then dropping them and talking to FOI officers.
5:50 What they say to me about it is it involves a lot of work. They weren’t consulted very much. They were hoping that people would look at the log before they put in their FOI request, and it would save them time from that point of view, and actually requesters don’t do that.
6:04 And also, organisations like the police, I know from talking to police FOI officers, are worried about if they make a mistake in this inadvertent disclosure of information to an FOI request, which has happened, if they put it on a disclosure log, the consequences are worse than if they’ve just said it off to one individual requester, so the police were certainly adopting a policy of trying to stop local forces from having disclosure logs for that reason.
6:32 So I think there’s a number of reasons why they haven’t developed in the way that I did actually think that they would.
6:38 [Maurice]: I mean, I think the direct answer is there is no obvious way of persuading a public authority that doesn’t want to have a disclosure log to have it. It’s described as good practice.
6:48 We were asked to do some consultancy work for the MOJ years ago about the case and the impact of it, which we did, and it’s not gone beyond that.
6:58 The expectation is that an authority will publish significant decisions, not all decisions, but if you look at Barnet, we looked at a few years ago, were publishing very comprehensive disclosure logs, and they calculated that it had a significant impact on the number of requests they received about council tax and parking, which were levels of high FOI requests.
7:21 The combination of the disclosure log and the datasets they published, they calculated, led to something like, I can’t remember what it was, a 30% – 20 or 30% drop in the expected number of FOI requests in those areas. So, there is an issue of self-interest, where it may benefit the authority.
7:38 They never believed that when you told them, if you publish more information, it will reduce the number of requests, because authorities say the more you publish, the more requests you will stimulate, but actually Barnet found that wasn’t the case.
7:50 [Audience member 5]: Thanks. It just goes back to the point about recording other requests. I know, for example, Scottish government, all their FOI requests are published online. I’m just wondering, is there a central repository that is anyone collecting these in a central way that anyone’s aware of, and are there other authorities that are doing it?
8:11 [Gareth]: Oh, so is anyone like collecting a central archive of disclosure logs, for example? Not that I’m aware of, but I would love to see it happen. I’ve thought I’ve had of can we do this on WhatDoTheyKnow, but…
8:23 [Gavin]: Well, Maurice, Martin, Julia, and Gareth. Thank you very much indeed.
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