FOI Fest skills session: Martin Rosenbaum
In this ten minute skills session from FOI Fest, longtime journalist and author of Freedom of Information: A Practical Guidebook Martin Rosenbaum shares his best tips based on usage of the Act that goes back to its implementation.
Martin mentions some of his slides during this talk, and if you’d rather watch than listen, you can do so on YouTube.
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Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!
0:04 [Martin Rosenbaum] Thanks very much. We’ve had a fair amount of advice already about to make effective use of FOI. And what I thought I would do with my two minutes here, as someone who, since the Act came into force in 2005 has made quite a lot of FOI requests, is just give some examples of things that I learnt along the way from particular cases that I was involved in, some which go back more or less, in fact, to 2005 some which are lessons which I learnt quite early on, like perhaps this one.
0:39 Now this is a document from the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Some of you are kind of peering at it. You don’t have to read it. That is not the point. You don’t have to read any of this text.
0:52 The interesting thing about this is the size of the stuff which is blanked out. This is what I got from the House of Lords Appointments Commission as the initial disclosure. In this case, a request I made in 2006, a little bit later, after I complained to the ICO, a little bit more appears.
1:09 This is before the ICO actually makes a decision. Just by complaining to the ICO, The House of Lords Appointments Commission actually suddenly said to me, “Oh, you can have this little bit more that we didn’t give you before.”
1:22 This is after the ICO decision, again, another little bit of information emerges, and then I took the case before the tribunal. And after the tribunal again, a little bit more information emerges.
1:35 So it’s this process of squeezing more and more information out. And what I learned very early on, I actually learned two lessons, actually early on from this process, one of which is, as you move up the hierarchy all the way to the tribunal, you get a better class of redaction.
1:57 But the second thing is that actually FOI is about persistence, certainly for the sort of things that I was interested in doing as a journalist, persistence is really important to making FOI requests.
2:10 So this is then it led me on, much later, to being willing to do this kind of thing. This is a story I did when I was at the BBC, as you can see, about Prince Charles, as he was then telling Tony Blair, when Blair was Prime Minister, that GM foods are a bad idea.
2:27 So Charles wanted to Blair to meet a small group of people with concerns about genetically modified food, and this took me two years to get out of the Cabinet Office, and it also took me four complaints to the ICO along the way about the process that the Cabinet Office was going through when they were dealing with this request, the delays the other procedural handling of the request.
2:58 It took for four rulings from the ICO in two years to get this information out of the Cabinet Office. So this illustrates one point about persistence. This case also illustrates what Lukas was talking about earlier, actually, which is about the EIR, which is that under the EIR, there are no absolute exemptions. There are only qualified exemptions, because GM foods is environmental information, the way the law was changed to prevent communications with the heir to the throne coming out, making them an absolute exemption that could not apply to EIR.
3:31 And that also illustrates the benefit of knowing the law very well. So I just want to make a couple more points about this aspect, about persistence, based on some data analysis I’ve done. So I looked at… this is based on central government statistics, 2024 – we haven’t got 2025 annual figures yet.
3:52 How often do people get more on internal review from the central government department than they got from the initial request? And what you’ve got here is that 20, 25% of the time people are getting more on internal review. So it’s well worth putting in that request for an internal review.
4:11 And then this is if you complain to the ICO. How often does the ICO overall public authorities and uphold complaints from requesters? So this is an analysis I did of different exemptions and how often those different kind of exemptions are upheld.
4:31 So what you can see at the top there – I mean, the top two don’t happen very often. Commercial interests. For someone who makes a FOI request, commercial interest, very, common exemption you come across basically half the time the ICO is overruling the use of that exemption by public authorities.
4:53 The ones at the bottom: court records, security bodies: the ICO overall.very rarely overrules those exemptions. Much harder to get overturned, certainly with those at the top, health and safety policy formation and so on, it is well worth complaining to the ICO.
5:08 And as other people have said already, the ICO is not the end of it. You can also take cases from the ICO to the tribunal. So I want to make a few other points about lessons I’ve learned.
5:20 Phraseology matters. What you get depends so much on how exactly you frame your FOI requests. You should ask for things specifically. Very, very specific might mean specifically in terms of time, specifically in terms of the organisation, specific phrasing, so important, I give you one example here.
5:43 This is again when I was at the BBC, we were doing some work on the Nursing and Midwifery Council, an organisation then in complete administrative chaos, had a huge backlog of complaints. And we asked the NMC for information about their backlog of complaints.
6:01 They actually said they didn’t have a backlog of complaints. Several months later, there was an official report into the NMC, at which point they admitted that what they had was a ‘historic caseload’. So the mistake we made was to use this word backlog, a judgmental word that they wouldn’t like. We should just have asked for the numbers about how long the complaints have been there for and so on.
6:29 So always be very careful about the exact phraseology that you use, and think it through very carefully in terms of, is it asking for exactly what you want?
6:40 Timing matters actually as well. And I think this is a point that hasn’t I haven’t heard anyone else make yet today, but for people who are journalists and campaigners, I think this is an important point. What happens, I’ve seen it so many times, is that there’s a strange event, a controversial event, and journalists immediately bang in FOI requests about this event.
7:05 Why did it happen? Who said what to whom beforehand? What was the briefing? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
7:10 My advice to you is, don’t do that straight away. Wait a couple of weeks, because in the wake of unusual, strange, weird and controversial events, what happens is that more information is created. People send emails to each other about, well, why did this happen? They hold meetings to discuss it, and so on.
7:30 So to give you an example of this. This is a story I did about a guy who got the OBE when three years previously, he’d featured on the front page of the times for overcharging the NHS great sums for medicines. And I thought, why has this guy got the OBE?
7:49 But I didn’t, when it was announced he was got the OBE, I didn’t send him the request immediately. I waited a couple of weeks, and eventually I got a document, and this had to go all the way to the tribunal, a document in which civil servants were discussing, “why hadn’t we spotted this story on the front page of the Times?”
8:10 Because they’d written this stuff to each other after the OBE was revealed. If I’d sent it on the day he’d got the OBE, I wouldn’t have got anything. Because they didn’t give me the discussions before the OBE, they only gave me the discussions afterwards, when they were discussing, how come we didn’t spot this, this fact that he’d been on the front page of The Times three years previously.
8:31 So waiting a couple of weeks meant that it was possible to get this information.
8:35 Next thing I want to talk about, it’s a bit like what Maurice talked about. Actually, I think about it in these terms, the FOI request is Venn diagram. This is so often what you’re trying to do when you’re putting in FOI requests. What you want is information that’s interesting and significant, but you also want to get it within the cost limit. You want to get it in the middle there.
9:00 And I would spend so much time thinking about this, what is the information that I can ask for that comes in those categories and comes bang in the middle? And really, what you’re trying to do is think of a way of slicing through the information to get that so here’s an example that illustrates this.
9:19 This is a story, as you can see about as a British tourist murdered in Thailand. A number of British tourists had been murdered in Thailand about this period, and we were asking about health and safety advice, and this was what the Foreign Office was discussing. “In our health and safety advice for travellers to Thailand, we don’t want to highlight the number of murders because it can have a disproportionate impact on Thailand’s reputation.”
9:46 And my point of view is the safety advice of travelers shouldn’t be dependent on whether that’s good or bad for the Thai tourist industry – it’s about is it safe or not. So they were taking stuff into account which they shouldn’t have done it. And this was obtained in emails sent between the Embassy in Bangkok, and the foreign office in London.
10:10 And the point here is that it was a way, because the Foreign Office would have had masses of information about this, it was a way of slicing through the vast amount of information the Foreign Office would have about this, slicing it through by talking about messages between London and Bangkok, which would bring in the important and interesting stuff, but also very easily findable just really quickly.
10:35 Always think about recorded information. FOI is about records. So this is an example of information which I just realised the government was actually collating, which was information about which makes and models of cars fail MOT tests, most often it wasn’t being released.
10:56 It took me 18 months, actually to squeeze it out of the Department for Transport, but they had this information. And I just want to make this point in particular. I really like this example, because what is now the case is this information, which for 18 months the government said it’s too commercially sensitive to release, is now released annually, regularly as open data.
11:17 So I think this is an example of FOI really doing its job. Previously, it was too secret to be released. Now is actually released proactively, regularly, of use to the public as open data, as a result of FOI. And I wanted to get that point in because I always like to finish on a positive note. Thank you.
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