What a Records Request Can and Cannot Reach

Disclosure statutes are drafted around a specific idea: a body holds records, and the public may see them. Everything that follows from that idea is available, and everything outside it is not, however reasonable the request may be. The three most common failures are all failures to notice where the idea stops.

Records, not answers

A request is not a question. "How many applications were refused on this ground" is a question. It is answerable only if a record already exists containing the figure.

No obligation to compile. A body holding a thousand files is not required to read them and produce a total, and a request phrased as a question is usually refused on that basis.

Reframe as a document. Asking for the monthly statistical return, or the management report that would contain the figure, converts an unanswerable request into an answerable one.

Databases are a partial exception. Where the body can run a query against a system it already operates, some schemes treat the output as an existing record, and practice varies considerably.

Explanations are never owed. A request for the reasons behind a policy reaches documents recording those reasons and does not oblige anybody to write an account of them.

Held by the body asked

Each body answers for its own records. A request to one department does not reach another, and requests sent to the wrong body are usually returned rather than forwarded.

Contractors are a gray area. Material held by a private contractor performing a public function is sometimes reachable and sometimes not, depending on the scheme and the contract.

Personal material of officials. Notes made by an official for their own use may not be records of the body at all, which removes a category people expect to receive.

Transferred functions follow the records. Where a function has moved between bodies, the records usually moved with it, and requests should follow the function rather than the name.

Ask who holds it first. Most bodies will say, and a short preliminary enquiry saves a full cycle spent waiting for a refusal on the ground that the material is held somewhere else entirely, as asking an agency for its own file sets out.

Produced as held, not as wanted

Format follows the holding. A body producing scanned images of pages is producing what it holds, and it is not obliged to supply a searchable version because that would be more useful.

Some schemes allow a format preference. Where the body can readily produce an alternative form it may have to, but readily is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

No reorganization. Records are produced in the order and grouping in which they are kept, and a request for them arranged chronologically is a request for work rather than for records.

Duplicates come with the file. A file containing eight copies of the same letter is produced with eight copies of it, and complaining about the volume achieves nothing because the volume is what the body holds.

Partial holdings are produced partially. A body holding pages three to seven of a document produces those pages, and the absence of the rest is a fact about the holding rather than a defect in the answer, which sometimes leads to proving that a fuller record once existed.

Exempt categories

Exemptions attach to content. They cannot be avoided by rephrasing the request, because the question is what the material is rather than how it was asked for.

Personal information about others. The commonest exemption in practice, and the reason a subject-access route produces so much more than a general request.

Deliberative and predecisional material. Advice, recommendations and internal debate, protected in most schemes while a decision is pending and sometimes afterward.

Law enforcement material. Ongoing investigations, techniques and sources, and this exemption is applied broadly wherever it plausibly applies.

Statutory prohibitions elsewhere. Some categories are protected by a separate statute altogether, and no disclosure scheme overrides them however the request is framed or however strong the case for disclosure.

Drafting around the limits

Name documents, not subjects. Requests that identify record types get answered; requests that identify a topic get a search that may or may not find anything.

Split large requests. Several narrow requests are frequently answered faster than one broad one, because each can be handled without a fee estimate or a scoping negotiation.

Accept a narrowing. Where a body offers to answer a reduced version, accepting is usually better than insisting, because the reduced version arrives and the argument does not.

Consider process instead. Where the material is deliberative and central, compulsory process in proceedings reaches material that a request will not, as set out in reaching records held by a non-party.

Keep the correspondence. The refusal, and the ground given for it, are evidence that the material exists and that the body declined to produce it, which is useful in itself.

The limits are frustrating precisely because they are not limits on what the public may know. They are limits on the mechanism, which was designed around the idea of inspecting records rather than around the idea of obtaining information.

That distinction explains most refusals. A request that fails is very often a request for information rather than for records, and rewriting it as a request for the documents that would contain the information converts it into something answerable.

It also explains why practitioners so often make several small requests instead of one large one. Each small request can be handled by a clerk in an afternoon, and material arrives while a single large request is still being scoped.

Where the mechanism genuinely cannot reach the material, that is worth establishing quickly rather than slowly. The correspondence recording a refusal is itself useful, and it points toward whichever other route remains open.

Immigration matters produce a great many requests that fail on the first of these limits, because what the applicant wants is an explanation rather than a document. Where the question is really about how a category works rather than about what a file contains, a library of immigration explainers answers it faster than any request will.

The most common recoverable mistake is sending a sound request to the wrong body. Functions move, departments merge, and records travel with the function rather than with the letterhead, so a preliminary enquiry about who holds the material is rarely wasted.