Information Commissioner hits London borough with enforcement notice over hundreds of overdue FOI requests

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued an enforcement notice to the London Borough of Lewisham for failing to respond to hundreds of overdue requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.

The notice comes after information access requests by the ICO revealed that the local authority's poor performance was much worse than statistics recently published online.

At the end of 2022, the council had 338 overdue requests for information, 221 of which were more than 12 months old, the ICO reported.

The oldest unanswered request was submitted more than two years ago on 3 December 2020.

While the council was focusing on new requests to improve its compliance with the statutory limit of 20 working days for a response – set out in section 10(1) of the 2000 Act – this was at the expense of tackling its backlog of older requests. Following enquiries by the ICO, it became clear that the council had no concrete plans to address this issue.

The enforcement notice requires the council to respond to all outstanding requests over 20 working days old, no later than six months from the date of the notice (17 March 2023).

It also calls upon the council to devise and publish an action plan, which formalises measures to mitigate delays in responding to requests.

"This action plan should be supported by a 'lessons learned' exercise, which examines the root cause of delays in responding to FOI requests, with mitigations for any recurring problems addressed specifically in the plan," the notice states.

Warren Seddon, Director of FOI and Transparency at the ICO, said: "By failing to respond to these requests, Lewisham Council is keeping hundreds of people in the dark about information they have a right to ask for. People need to have confidence in the decisions being made by their local authority and this council's failure to comply with the law erodes trust in democracy and open government."

He added: "This is our second Freedom of Information enforcement notice in recent months, and I hope it is clear that we will be taking action when public authorities fail to be transparent and accountable." 

The action comes under the ICO's renewed approach to regulating the 2000 Act, where public authorities are clearly not complying with the law. The approach is set out in the ICO's new FOI and Transparency Regulatory Manual and three-year strategic plan ICO25.

An enforcement notice is issued under s25 of the 2000 Act and requires a public authority to take specific steps to comply with part I of the Act.

A spokesperson for Lewisham said: “We wholly accept the enforcement notice from the Information Commissioner’s Office and recognise our current performance in responding to freedom of information requests is not acceptable.

“We are already taking steps to address this, including bringing in extra staff to focus on resolving older cases. We are fully cooperating with the ICO and will be publishing our improvement plan in due course.”

Adam Carey