FOI Fest skills session: Maurice Frankel on the cost limit
In this ten-minute session from FOI Fest, Chief Executive of the Campaign for Freedom of Information Maurice Frankel explains how to avoid having your requests refused because of the cost limit that is baked into the FOI Act, and what some of the problems with that limit are.
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Transcript
0:00 [Gavin Freeguard] Welcome to FOI Fest 2026!
0:04 [Maurice Frankel] My first thing to say is not specifically on my topic, but it’s this: if you don’t know anything about the subject, don’t make an FOI request.
0:14 FOI is not the place to start learning about something that you don’t know anything about. If an idea pops into your head, do some research about it.
Figure out what’s going on. Figure out what the authority you’re interested in has already published about it. Figure out what others have published about it. Figure out whether you’re bound to run into an obstacle based on what’s happened to other requesters, and then decide about making your request.
0:37 So that’s not on my topic. My topic is the cost limit. And my starting point is this: if you ask for too much, you may get nothing. That is how the UK the cost limit in the UK Freedom of Information Act works.
0:55 So you are entitled to ask for information where effectively finding the information can be done within 18 hours for most public authorities, and 24 hours for government departments or parliaments or assemblies. If you put in multiple requests, either in the same request, in the same email, let’s say, or separately, a few days or even a few weeks apart, they can be aggregated and all refused, if the time needed to find the information for all of them exceeds the 18 or 24 hours.
1:39 So the dilemma that we all face as requesters is, how can I put in a good request which catches everything I’m interested in without provoking a refusal under the cost limit because I’ve asked for too much?
1:53 So there’s no very easy answer to that question, except have a look and see if you can discover from WhatDoTheyKnow, or from disclosure logs on authority sites, or from Parliament for answers to parliamentary questions, where that type of level is normally drawn.
2:15 So you need to do a little bit of thinking and work to try and find that out, or you can have a stab in the dark, but you do need to know something about what it is you’re asking before we do that. The position is that if you make a request, if you make multiple, more than one request for the same or similar information within a 60 working day period, all the requests you make of that kind can be aggregated and refused if you exceed the limit for a single request.
2:50 That’s the problem that we’re all dealing with here. You can’t get around this problem by allocating half of your request to a colleague or a partner or a neighbour, because if it appears to the authority that that’s what you’ve done, they’re entitled to aggregate the partner’s, the colleague’s and the neighbour’s request with yours: that is, if the nature of your request is so similar that that’s what it looks like, that’s what you’re likely to to run into.
3:19 So the answer is partly this, if you’re asking for information, which you think the authority is monitoring and holds on computer in a database or spreadsheet, and can easily extract the particular segment of information you want, there’s no problem in terms of the cost limit probably.
3:41 If you’re asking for information which would require the authority to look at individual files, and there’s more than a small number of them, you’re walking straight into a cost limit problem. So what you can’t do, and these may be AI generated things, but I’ll just give you an example of one that’s recent.
4:01 I’ve seen recently in a tribunal decision, “In a seven month period, how many motoring offenses took place in Halifax and Wakefield? How many people were stopped for using a mobile phone? How many of them accepted six points on their driver’s license and were fined? How many of them challenged the penalty and what was the outcome? What’s the ethnic makeup of the motorists? How many of the of those requesters were white male, white female, Asian, male, Asian female, black male, black female? How many white males were placed in the back of a police van or car? How many white females were placed?” and so on and so on and so forth.
4:44 And the answer is, you’ve made a request that is almost doomed unless all that information is collated electronically by the police. Now the police force in this case, actually were good enough to come back. They refused to join the section 12, the cost limit, but they came back and said, “If you restrict your request to motoring offenses involving the use of a phone while driving in Halifax and Wakefield and the ethnic origin – that’s the only thing you ask for – we can probably give you that within section 12, but the longer list you wouldn’t be able to get.”
5:18 The second thing is, questions that you could ask in an interview if you’re face to face with someone, quite a lot of those won’t work as FOI requests. You can’t say, “What progress are you making with this issue?” unless the progress is held in a recorded form in terms of numbers of things dealt with in a particular time.
5:38 But if you just want an update on “what progress you’re making”., that’s not a good FOI request. You’re likely to be refused as an invalid request. You’re not describing the information properly.
5:50 If you ask for information which is already public, you’re going to waste your request. If you ask for information which is not held by the authority, you’re going to waste your request. The only penalty is going to be four weeks or longer waiting for an answer that tells you you’re not going to get anything.
6:04 So if you spend your time reading up about the subject, you may save yourself all that time and don’t ask for information that you don’t need but you think would be useful. For the sake of completeness, that’s a killer very often, because we can all think of ways of filling out the request so that every possible aspect of the subject is covered.
6:24 But if you cover every possible aspect of the subject, you’re asking for a cost refusal, that’s the problem. And now the other thing that is tricky here, is the concept that a request that is being aggregated are those for, “to any extent the same or similar information”. So that’s the phrase in the Act: “to any extent”.
6:46 So if they’re all on the same overall subject, or the commission uses the term “overarching theme”, they can be aggregated. And so that is another problem, which you are going to need to try and deal with too many specific requests which can’t be answered from electronically indexed data.
7:07 Emails are a different matter. Emails, they can find the number of hits in a very short time, but if they have to open every email to see whether it fits your request, you’re going to be refused on cost grounds, unless you’ve got only a handful of emails.
7:21 And the final illustration I want to use is this, recently we came across a tribunal decision where what had been aggregated was a request about the numbers of students accommodated in college accommodation, and a request for the spending at each college bar.
7:45 Now to me, there’s nothing in common between those two. They’re not to any extent, for the same or similar information, but the answer that came up in the Commissioner’s decision notice, upheld by the tribunal, was they were all for data about the college, and they all had to be answered by the same unit in the college.
8:05 Now, if the criteria are extended in that way, the Act will become unworkable, because it would mean that you couldn’t ask a question about the number of of academics with PhDs, plus a request about the number of college sports events which had been rained out, because they were both for data about the college.
8:32 OK, so that’s a killer thing. The guy who took an appeal to the tribunal didn’t turn up in person, so he probably just said, this is not similar information, and left it like that, so didn’t attempt to make an argued case. So the thing you have to look at very carefully is, you’ve got to try and look at it from the authority’s perspective as well as your own.
8:55 You want the information that you want, but you also don’t want the authority to see that you have put them under enormous pressure to do a whole lot of manual searching of files in order to get the information. Now, there’s no easy solutions to that.
9:12 I mean, what I’ve just given you is extract from a training course that we run for requesters periodically. And all we can do with that course, is come up with more suggestions about how you might get yourself an idea of where the line might be drawn, but there’s still no absolute answer to that question. But bear that in mind.
9:32 In other words, it’s very easy for a requester in 15 minutes to write a request that will take an FOI officer two weeks to answer, and it’s very easy for a public authority to refuse a request on cost grounds. And so if you’re not working towards each other, if you’re not working to try and avoid creating that burden for the authority in your own interests, even if you’re not interested in the FOI officer’s interests. And you’re going to run into this brick wall, and it’s very, very frustrating.
10:04 And that’s another reason why don’t make the request. The first thing you do when an idea comes to you, should not be to make an FOI request, because you’re going to be even more likely to hit that particular wall. Thank you very much.
10:20 [Myf Nixon] Hello to our most completist listeners. If you’re still listening, thank you so much for sticking with this right to the end. I’m Myf from mySociety, and it’s my job to put these podcasts together.
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