Despite the General Election, its business as usual for FOI practitioners. In fact many will report an increase in FOI requests. Understanding what requestors are interested in can help FOI practitioners to consider whether proactive publication of this information would benefit their organisation and help to reduce information requests.
Working with WhatDoTheyKnow (WDTK), the ICO have analysed a sample of more than 150,000 requests made during 2022 and identified common themes in the information that has been requested. This has been broken down into 5 sectors:
Health
- Meetings, committees, and minutes
- Data and statistics
- Complaints
- Recruitment and staffing information, including fuel allowance and travel costs
- Policies
- Mental health care
Local Government
- Highways, roads and parking
- Bus lanes and bus services
- Children, schools and care
- Housing and planning
- Contracts
- Internal correspondence
- Asbestos
Education
- Admissions
- Grades, scores and results
- Management and finances
- Economics, law, engineering, science and medicine courses.
Central Government
- Data and statistics
- Correspondence and communications
- Meetings
- Covid-19
- Costs
Emergency Services
- Statistical information
- Hate crimes, crimes of a sexual nature, assault, and stalking
- Vehicle and fleet
- Roads and speed limits
The ICO says that understanding the public’s information needs can better equip public authorities to meet one of the challenges set out in their recent open letter to senior leaders: ‘… look at what people are asking you about and actively publish it.’ Proactive publication also leads to greater transparency and could decrease the number of information requests public authorities receive.
Our FOI Exemptions workshop is ideal for FOI Officers who want to develop their knowledge of the exemptions and sharpen their Refusal Notice writing skills.
