It can be hard to untangle government's complicated structured, and work out who knows the information that you want. Here are a few tips:
Please contact us with the name of the public authority and, if you can find it, their contact email address for Freedom of Information requests.
If you'd like to help add a whole category of public authority to the site, we'd love to hear from you too.
WhatDoTheyKnow lets you make requests for information to a range of organisations:
In the last case, we're using the site to lobby for expansion of the scope of the FOI Act. Even if an organisation is not legally obliged to respond to an FOI request, they can still do so voluntarily.
Please put in your request only what is needed so that someone can easily identify what information you are asking for. Please do not include any of the following:
If you do, we may have to remove your request to avoid problems with libel law, which is a pain for both you and us. Short, succinct messages make it easier for authorities to be clear what information you are requesting, which means you will get a reply more quickly.
If you want information to support an argument or campaign, Freedom of Information is a powerful tool. Although you may not use this site to run your campaign, we encourage you to use it to get the information you need. We also encourage to run your campaign elsewhere - one effective and very easy way is to <%= link_to 'start your own blog', "http://wordpress.com/"%>. You are welcome to link to your campaign from this site in an annotation to your request (you can make annotations after submitting the request).
Making an FOI request is nearly always free.
Authorities often include unnecessary, scary, boilerplate in acknowledgement messages saying they "may" charge a fee. Ignore such notices. They hardly ever will actually charge a fee. If they do, they can only charge you if you have specifically agreed in advance to pay. More details from the Information Commissioner.
Sometimes an authority will refuse your request, saying that the cost of handling it exceeds £600 (for central government) or £450 (for all other public authorities). At this point you can refine your request. e.g. it would be much cheaper for an authority to tell you the amount spent on marshmallows in the past year than in the past ten years.
By law, public authorities must respond promptly to requests.
Even if they are not prompt, in nearly all cases they must respond within 20 working days. If you had to clarify your request, or they are a school, or one or two other cases, then they may have more time (full details).
WhatDoTheyKnow will email you if you don't get a timely response. You can then send the public authority a message to remind them, and tell them if they are breaking the law.
There are several things you can do if you never get a response.
Authorities often add legal boilerplate about the "Re-Use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005", which at first glance implies you may not be able do anything with the information.
You can, of course, write articles about the information or summarise it, or quote parts of it. We also think you should feel free to republish the information in full, just as we do, even though in theory you might not be allowed to do so. See our policy on copyright.
Have a look at the access to official information pages on the Information Commissioner's website.
If you're requesting information from a Scottish public authority, the process is very similar. There are differences around time limits for compliance. See the Scottish Information Commissioner's guidance for details.
No. Requests made using WhatDoTheyKnow are public, made under the Freedom of Information Act, and cannot help you find information about a private individual.
If you would like to know what information a public authority holds about yourself, you should make a "Subject Access Request" in private using Data Protection law. The leaflet "How to access your information" (on the Information Commissioner's website) explains how to do this.
If you see that somebody has included personal information, perhaps unwittingly, in a request, please contact us immediately so we can remove it.
WhatDoTheyKnow is currently only designed for public requests. All responses that we receive are automatically published on the website for anyone to read.
You should contact the public authority directly if you would like to make a request in private. If you're interested in buying a system which helps you manage FOI requests in secret, then contact us.
Some public authorities, such as South East Water, don't come under the Freedom of Information Act, but do come under another law called the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR).
It's a very similar law, so you make a request to them using WhatDoTheyKnow in just the same way as an FOI request. The only difference is that on the page where your write you request, it reminds you that you can only request "environmental information" and tells you what that means. It is quite broad.
You can, of course, request environmental information from other authorities. Just make a Freedom of Information (FOI) request as normal. The authority has a duty to work out if the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) is the more appropriate legislation to reply under.
We will not disclose your email address to anyone unless we are obliged to by law, or you ask us to. This includes the public authority that you are sending a request to. They only get to see an email address @whatdotheyknow.com which is specific to that request.
If you send a message to another user on the site, then it will reveal your email address to them. You will be told that this is going to happen.
We publish your request on the Internet so that anybody can read it and make use of the information that you have found. We do not normally delete requests (more details).
Your name is tangled up with your request, so has to be published as well. It is only fair, as we're going to publish the name of the civil servant who writes the response to your request. Using your real name also helps people get in touch with you to assist you with your research or to campaign with you.
By law, you must use your real name for the request to be a valid Freedom of Information request. See the next question for alternatives if you do not want to publish your full name.
Technically, you must use your real name for your request to be a valid Freedom of Information request in law. See this guidance from the Information Commissioner (January 2009).
However, the same guidance also says it is good practice for the public authority to still consider a request made using an obvious pseudonym. You should refer to this if a public authority refuses a request because you used a pseudonym.
Be careful though, even if the authority follows this good practice, the pseudonym will probably make it impossible for you to complain to the Information Commissioner later about the handling of your request.
There are several good alternatives to using a pseudonym.
Please do not try to impersonate someone else.
WhatDoTheyKnow is a permanent, public archive of Freedom of Information requests. Even though you may not find the response to a request useful any more, it may be of interest to others. For this reason, we will not delete requests.
Under exceptional circumstances we may remove or change your name on the website, following similar policy as for the names of public servants. Similarly, we may also remove other personal information. See 'Can you take down personal information about me?'.
If you're worried about this before you make your request, see the section on pseudonyms.
If a public authority asks you for your full, physical address, reply to them saying that section 8.1.b of the FOI Act asks for an "address for correspondence", and that the email address you are using is sufficient.
The Ministry of Justice has guidance on this – "As well as hard copy written correspondence, requests that are transmitted electronically (for example, in emails) are acceptable ... If a request is received by email and no postal address is given, the email address should be treated as the return address."
As if that isn't enough, the Information Commissioner's Hints for Practitioners say "Any correspondence could include a request for information. If it is written (this includes e-mail), legible, gives the name of the applicant, an address for reply (which could be electronic), and includes a description of the information required, then it will fall within the scope of the legislation."
If an authority only has a paper copy of the information that you want, they may ask you for a postal address. To start with, try persuading them to scan in the documents for you. You can even offer to gift them a scanner, which in that particular case embarrassed the authority into finding one they had already.
If that doesn't work, and you want to provide your postal address privately in order to receive the documents, mark your request as "They are going to reply by post", and it will give you an email address to use for that purpose.
Annotations on WhatDoTheyKnow are to help people get the information they want, or to give them pointers to places they can go to help them act on it. We reserve the right to remove anything else.
Endless, political discussions are not allowed. Post a link to a suitable forum or campaign site elsewhere.
WhatDoTheyKnow is a service run by a charity. It helps ordinary members of the public make FOI requests, and easily track and share the responses.
The FOI request you received was made by someone using WhatDoTheyKnow. You can simply reply to the request as you would any other request from an individual. The only difference is that your response will be automatically published on the Internet.
If you have privacy or other concerns, please read the answers below. You might also like to read this page from the top to find out more about what the site does from the point of view of a user. You can also search the site to find the authority that you work for, and view the status of any requests made using the site.
Finally, we welcome comments and thoughts from FOI officers, please get in touch.
WhatDoTheyKnow is not making any requests. We are sending requests on behalf of our users, who are real people making the requests.
Look at it like this - if lots of different people made requests from different Hotmail email addresses, then you would not think that Microsoft were making vexatious requests. It is exactly the same if lots of requests are made via WhatDoTheyKnow. Moreover, since all requests are public it is much easier for you to see if one of our users is making vexatious requests.
If that isn't enough for you, the letter from the ICO to Rother District Council gives some guidance on the matter.
If a request appears on the site, then we have attempted to send it to the authority by email. Any delivery failure messages will automatically appear on the site. You can check the address we're using with the "View FOI email address" link which appears on the page for the authority. Contact us if there is a better address we can use.
Requests are sometimes not delivered because they are quietly removed by "spam filters" in the IT department of the authority. Authorities can make sure this doesn't happen by asking their IT departments to "whitelist" any email from @whatdotheyknow.com. If you ask us we will resend any request, and/or give technical details of delivery so an IT department can chase up what happened to the message.
Finally, you can respond to any request from your web browser, without needing any email, using the "respond to request" link at the bottom of each request page.
The Freedom of Information Act says:
A public authority must comply with section 1(1) promptly and in any event not later than the twentieth working day following the date of receipt.
The nerdy detail of exactly how weekends are counted, and what happens if the request arrives out of office hours, is just that - detail. What matters here is that the law says authorities must respond promptly.
If you've got a good reason why the request is going to take a while to process, requesters find it really helpful if you can send a quick email with a sentence or two saying what is happening.
FOI officers often have to do a lot of hard work to answer requests, and this is hidden from the public. We think it would help everyone to have more of that complexity visible.
Please read the answer to the previous question first. Legally, authorities must respond promptly to FOI requests. If they fail to do that, it is best if they show the hard work they are doing by explaining what is taking the extra time to do.
That said, WhatDoTheyKnow does show the maximum legal deadline for response on each request. Here's how we calculate it.
The date thus calculated is shown on requests with the text "By law, Liverpool City Council should normally have responded by...". There is only one case which is not normal, see the next question about public interest test time extensions.
Schools are also a special case, which WhatDoTheyKnow displays differently.
If you're getting really nerdy about all this, read the detailed ICO guidance. Meanwhile, remember that the law says authorities must respond promptly. That's really what matters.
The Freedom of Information Act lets authorities claim an indefinite time extension when applying a public interest test. Information Commissioner guidance says that it should only be used in "exceptionally complex" cases (FOI Good Practice Guidance No. 4). WhatDoTheyKnow doesn't specifically handle this case, which is why we use the phrase "should normally have responded by" when the 20 working day time is exceeded.
The same guidance says that, even in exceptionally complex cases, no Freedom of Information request should take more than 40 working days to answer. WhatDoTheyKnow displays requests which are overdue by that much with stronger wording to indicate they are definitely late.
The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act does not allow such a public interest extension. WhatDoTheyKnow would like to see the law changed to either remove the extension from the UK Act, or to reintroduce an absolute time limit of 40 working days even with the extension (the House of Lords voted to remove provision for such a time limit during the initial passage of the UK Act through Parliament).
If you see any personal information about you on the site which you'd like us to remove or hide, then please let us know, specifying exactly what information you believe to be problematic and why, and where it appears on the site.
If it is sensitive personal information that has been accidentally posted, then we will usually remove it. Normally we will only consider requests to remove personal information which come from the individual concerned, but for sensitive information we would appreciate anyone pointing out anything they see.
We consider for various reasons that there is a strong public interest in retaining the names of officers or servants of public authorities. We will only remove such names in exceptional circumstances, such as where the disclosure of a name and position of employment would substantially risk an individual's safety. If you are such an official and you wish to have your name removed for such an urgent reason, you must supply us with a request to do so from your line manager. This request must demonstrate that a risk has been perceived which outweighs the public interest, and must demonstrate that efforts have been made to conceal the name on the organisation's own website.
For all other requests we apply a public interest test to decide whether information should be removed. Section 32 of the Data Protection Act 1998 permits us to do this, as the material we publish is journalistic. We cannot easily edit many types of attachments (such as PDFs, or Microsoft Word or Excel files), so we will usually ask that authorities resend these with the personal information removed.
To prevent spam, we automatically remove most emails and some mobile numbers from responses to requests. Please contact us if we've missed one. For technical reasons we don't always remove them from attachments, such as certain PDFs.
If you need to know what an address was that we've removed, please get in touch with us. Occasionally, an email address forms an important part of a response and we will post it up in an obscured form in an annotation.
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