The Freedom of Information Act 2000 was enacted just over 25 years ago, and has now been fully in force for two decades. Ben Worthy uses Unit research to contradict assertions that the Act was a mistake in principle or is simply a tool for journalists, and outlines five ways in which it has changed things for the better.

The Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2000 came fully into force just over 20 years ago. It allows the public, as a legal right, to ask for information from public bodies. It was a reform promised in every Labour manifesto since 1974, and long resisted by a succession of politicians and officials. Tony Blair picked it up and championed it in the 1990s. Then, after some rather serious backstage wrangling and growing jitters, the law limped onto the statute book in 2000, coming fully into force on 1 January 2005.

Looked at from 2025, FOI appears to be thriving. It covers 100,000 public bodies from central and local government, as well as the police and the NHS. The law is being used, and that use is growing. Requests to central government began at 25,000 a year in 2005, and as of 2023 stood at a record 70,475. Our work at local government level found that for every request that goes to Whitehall, around three or four go to local government. But there are worries FOI is slowing down and being starved of resources. Underneath the bonnet, what is really happening?

Between 2005 and 2012, the Constitution Unit carried out a number of studies of FOI, looking at the impact on central government, local government, as well as on the UK Parliament and universities. It carried out a series of surveys tracking the progress of FOI in local government between 2005 and 2011, as well as a deep dive into the effects of the law at senior levels.

Here are five things we know about FOI:

1. FOI is local

All politics is local and, interestingly, most FOI requests are too. Although central government requests hog the headlines, we found that around 80%, or four in every five requests, go to local government. Our work confirmed that, as one Information Commissioner said, ‘the real value of FOI is in the pages of local newspapers’. Just a glance at the local press shows what FOI can do, from exposing the (very large) number of potholes in Fife, to mapping the 180 public libraries closed since 2016.

Any attempt to understand FOI needs to keep in mind that most requests are for ‘micro-political’ issues, and the benefits are often hidden. FOI is really about holes in roads and refuse collection, not who invaded which country and why. The worry is that deep austerity may be causing slowdowns and delays.

2. The media are vital to FOI

FOI needs the press for two reasons. First, because journalists are key users who push at the boundaries and fight battles for access. In the UK, the press helped stop several attempts to weaken it. Second, perhaps even more importantly, the media are the main route to most people hearing about it – as these 103 examples from 2015 demonstrate.  

But there are concerns. One is that FOI requests from journalists can be subject to special treatment, as happened in Scotland and with Times journalist George Greenwood, who (ironically) then found out what officials were saying about him. Another broader worry is that journalism itself is weakening,  especially locally, and the UK’s ever expanding news deserts mean that a key user group is disappearing in front of our eyes.

3. FOI is popular and used by the public

Despite Tony Blair’s claim that FOI is mainly used by journalists, the Unit’s research found that the public are the largest group of FOI users.

Requester Type	Local government (%)	Central government (%)
Public	37	39
Journalists	33	8
Business	22	8
Academics/researchers	1-2	13

(The data above is from a 2015 Unit article)

I used to say that FOI requesters were like people who complain in restaurants: only a few people do it, you don’t necessarily want to be one of them, but those who complain make things better for everyone. I was wrong. Remarkably, FOI use seems to be infectious, as this poll shows, and more than one in 10 people have now made an FOI request.

FOI is popular too, in the sense that it has strong public support. This poll in Scotland, where there is a separate Scottish FOI law, found that 97% supported the idea of accessing information and 83% agreed that FOI helps to prevent ‘bad practice in public bodies’. In fact, 89% wanted the law extended to cover private contractors.

4. FOI makes politicians more accountable

The good news is that FOI does make politicians have to explain and justify what they do. It applies an accountability pressure, whether over why there is a rise in home schooling, why setting up data centres seems to always get planning permission or the rise of self-harm in immigration detention centres.  

It is because of FOI, and a legal battle by expert Martin Rosenbaum, the references (called ‘citations’) for potential appointees to the House of Lords are now available for us to see (and question). Due to FOI, Private Eye has produced a map that allows you to see which local councillors were late with their council tax.

5. Politicians don’t like it (but officials don’t mind)

Politicians don’t like FOI. This is not new, and not really news. In 1966, US President Lyndon Johnson famously refused to be photographed signing the US FOI law, then wrote a note effectively undermining it.

In the UK FOI was publicly supported and privately disliked. Tony Blair breached this taboo in 2010 with a two-page rant in his memoirs about how he should never have done it, someone should have stopped him, and that it was being abused by journalists. David Cameron followed by claiming it was ‘furring up the arteries of government’. Liz Truss also came out against it, claiming the law was making meetings impossible.

This can all be dismissed as noise, but the worry is that it gives the green light to others to use private emails, delete WhatsApps and texts and indulge in other skullduggery to avoid FOI laws. It sends out a signal that FOI is not important. It is no wonder that central government is plagued with delays and lowering levels of openness. As the UK Information Commissioner has warned, ‘information delayed is information denied’.

Interestingly, Unit studies found that FOI is not opposed by officials. There is no mass attempt to avoid records, and FOI may actually have made recording better. Nor is it particularly expensive, as some claim.

Conclusion: FOI is not alone.

FOI was passed in the early days of the internet, and now exists in a very different world, where it is part of a whole range of openness tools. There is MySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow, a platform to make public requests, which, at time of writing, had an archive of 1,143,555 requests. FOI has powered some interesting innovations, such as a bot that tweeted whenever someone with a parliament IP address made a change to Wikipedia. It fits neatly with a lobbying data platform from Transparency International UK, where at the push of a button users can make an FOI request to find out when – and how often – ministers have met with a particular lobbyist.

As FOI approaches a quarter of a century, we can comfortably say it has been a success. It certainly shouldn’t be one of Tony Blair’s two greatest regrets as Prime Minister, as he claimed (banning fox hunting was the other). FOI is not perfect, but it is used, it broadly works, and it has done at least some of what it should. But this is not a reason to rest easy, and there are signs that resources, resistance and a dash of skulduggery can seriously weaken the benefits it brings.

The Unit has an extensive archive of work on FOI, which includes work on the impact of FOI on parliament, Whitehall, and local government, its effect on universities, and how government policy is formulated in the context of FOI.

About the author

Dr Ben Worthy is a Reader in Politics and Public Policy at Birkbeck College. He worked at the Constitution Unit as a Research Associate on FOI until 2012.

Further Reading

Worthy, Ben and Hazell, Robert, Disruptive, Dynamic and Democratic? Ten Years of Freedom of Information in the UK (December 28, 2015).

Worthy, Ben; Amos, Jim; Hazell, Robert and Bourke, Gabrielle (2011) Town hall transparency? the impact of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on local government in England. London, UK: The Constitution Unit.