Is the Freedom of Information Act Still Fit for Purpose in the Age of AI?

When I first became involved in dealing with Freedom of Information requests at Birmingham City Council, one of the earliest requests I encountered concerned the number of pot plants the Council paid to have placed and maintained in its offices.

I remember being tempted to seek clarification from the requester. Did they mean ordinary plants growing in pots, or cannabis plants? Fortunately, common sense prevailed, and I resisted the temptation.

It was an amusing introduction to a piece of legislation that has since become an important part of public sector accountability. But it also raised a question that has remained with me throughout my subsequent career in information governance.

Just because someone has a legal right to ask a question, does that mean the public should always have to bear the cost of answering it?

That question has become increasingly relevant as artificial intelligence makes it easier than ever to generate detailed Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

Transparency matters — but so do resources

The Freedom of Information Act 2000, which came fully into force in January 2005, was intended to make public authorities more open and accountable. It has undoubtedly served an important purpose.

Journalists, campaigners, researchers and ordinary members of the public have used FOI to expose questionable expenditure, identify poor decision-making, challenge public policy and uncover information that might otherwise have remained hidden.

Those are entirely legitimate purposes, and any discussion about reforming the legislation must recognise their value. However, there is another side to the story.

Every FOI request has a potential cost. Someone must read it, understand what information is being requested, establish whether that information is held, locate it, consider whether exemptions apply, make any necessary redactions and prepare a legally compliant response.

In a large government department, this work may be undertaken by a specialist information rights team. In a small primary school, it might fall to the headteacher, school business manager or another member of staff who already has more than enough to do. The legislation may be the same, but the resources available to meet its requirements are very different.

When an FOI request becomes a news story

A recent Birmingham Live article provides an interesting illustration. On 17 October 2026, Birmingham Live reported on information obtained through a nationwide exercise by the Press Association involving more than 100 FOI requests to hospital trusts.

The requests concerned objects removed from patients’ rectums in Accident and Emergency and Urgent Care departments since 2022. Among the objects reportedly identified were a mobile phone and coat hanger in Birmingham, Lego bricks and a door handle in London, and a boiled egg, potato and other unusual objects in Berkshire.

The resulting story was certainly unusual and likely to attract considerable public attention. According to the wider Press Association reporting, 106 NHS trusts received requests, but only 11 provided itemised lists. Others did not hold the information or relied on the statutory cost exemption.

There is a legitimate public health dimension to such information, including understanding patterns of injury, treatment requirements and the associated cost to the NHS. However, it is also reasonable to ask whether identifying precisely which unusual objects had been removed from patients represented the most productive use of NHS administrative resources.

How much staff time was spent dealing with these requests across the country? How many people were involved? What was the total cost? We do not know. And that is precisely the problem. The cost of answering FOI requests is often largely invisible to the public.

Original article: Birmingham Live, ‘Birmingham hospital staff pull phone and coat hanger from patient’s bottoms’, 17 October 2026: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/birmingham-hospital-staff-pull-phone-34779652

The particular problem for schools

Since establishing my consultancy, I have worked extensively with schools, academies and multi-academy trusts, providing advice and support on data protection, information governance and Freedom of Information.

One of the recurring challenges is the limited capacity available to deal with information requests. Schools are not government departments with dedicated teams of information specialists. Their primary purpose is to educate children, support their development and keep them safe.

Yet schools can receive requests covering everything from expenditure and contracts to staffing arrangements, disciplinary procedures, school meals, IT systems and internal policies. Some requests raise matters of genuine public interest. Others appear to have very little practical purpose, particularly where the information requested is already available publicly or the subject matter is relatively trivial.

Nevertheless, a school cannot simply refuse an otherwise valid FOI request because it considers the subject unimportant. Staff must still assess it properly and comply with the law.

Consider a school business manager spending several hours searching financial records to establish how much the school has spent on a particular minor item over several years. That time is not free. It is time that might otherwise have been spent managing budgets, supporting teaching staff, dealing with premises issues or arranging essential services.

Where a school has to seek external professional advice, additional costs may arise.

Multiply that across thousands of schools, and the potential burden becomes considerable.

Artificial intelligence changes the balance

When FOI legislation was introduced, preparing a detailed request generally required some thought, research and effort. Today, a requester can ask an AI system to produce a comprehensive FOI request about virtually any subject in seconds.

The system can suggest additional questions, identify possible categories of information, draft follow-up correspondence and help challenge an authority’s response. A single individual can potentially produce numerous requests with relatively little effort.

The receiving authority, however, cannot necessarily process those requests with the same ease. Although AI may help public authorities with some administrative tasks, the responsibility for identifying the correct records, protecting personal information and making lawful disclosure decisions remains with the authority.

There is therefore a growing imbalance between the effort required to submit a request and the effort required to answer it. The Information Commissioner’s Office has recognised this issue in its guidance on FOI and artificial intelligence.

AI is not inherently the problem. It can help people exercise legitimate information rights and make public information more accessible. The difficulty arises when the technology removes almost all practical barriers to submitting requests without similarly reducing the burden of answering them.

What protection does the legislation provide?

The Act does contain safeguards. Under section 12, most public authorities, including schools, can refuse a request where the estimated cost of compliance exceeds £450. For this purpose, staff time is calculated at a statutory rate of £25 per hour, giving an effective limit of 18 hours.

However, the calculation is restricted to particular activities, principally establishing whether information is held and locating, retrieving and extracting it. It does not generally include time spent considering exemptions, redacting exempt information or preparing the response.

Consequently, a request can impose a significant administrative burden without exceeding the statutory cost threshold. Section 14 also permits authorities to refuse vexatious or repeated requests in appropriate circumstances.

However, a request is not automatically vexatious simply because it seems pointless, irritating or of limited public interest. The authority must assess the circumstances and be able to justify its decision. The ICO has made clear that the value and purpose of a request can be considered alongside the burden it imposes, but this is not a general licence to reject requests simply because a school disagrees with the requester’s priorities.

Public authorities also have duties to provide reasonable advice and assistance to people making requests. The result is that schools may still have to devote considerable resources to handling requests they reasonably believe offer very little public benefit.

What could change?

More than two decades after FOI came into operation, it is reasonable to examine whether its arrangements remain appropriate. That does not mean abandoning transparency or making it difficult for the public to hold authorities accountable. It means considering whether the legislation achieves a fair balance between access to information and the responsible use of public resources.

Should the statutory cost calculation recognise more of the actual work involved in responding to requests, including reviewing records and undertaking necessary redactions? Should there be clearer provisions for managing high volumes of substantially similar AI-assisted requests?

Could schools and other smaller authorities benefit from a more proportionate framework that recognises their limited administrative capacity? Should public authorities be encouraged to publish more commonly requested information proactively, reducing the need for repeated individual requests? And should there be greater public awareness of the costs associated with exercising information rights?

Any reforms would require care. Financial or administrative barriers must not become a means of concealing poor governance, avoiding scrutiny or discouraging legitimate requests. A request that appears trivial to one person may reveal a much more significant problem when considered alongside other information. Nevertheless, the cost of compliance is a legitimate public interest consideration in its own right.

The hidden cost to public services

In my experience, the public rarely sees the full administrative work involved in dealing with information requests. They see the question and, eventually, the answer. They do not necessarily see the hours spent searching records, consulting colleagues, reviewing exemptions, protecting personal data and checking the accuracy of the response.

In schools, those hours have a direct opportunity cost. Public money spent dealing with requests is money that cannot be spent elsewhere. Staff time consumed by administrative compliance is time unavailable for other responsibilities.

None of this means that information rights should be weakened simply because they create work. Accountability inevitably carries a cost, and sometimes that cost is entirely justified. But it is equally legitimate to question whether every use of the statutory process delivers benefits proportionate to the resources consumed.

A question whose time has come

The Freedom of Information Act was introduced in a very different technological environment. Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how easily people can prepare, submit and pursue information requests.

It has not removed the legal responsibilities placed upon public authorities, nor has it provided schools with additional staff or funding to discharge those responsibilities. The challenge is to preserve the essential principle of public accountability while ensuring that the system remains sustainable for the organisations required to operate it.

My early encounter with Birmingham City Council’s pot plants request was amusing, and perhaps relatively harmless. Today, however, the possibility of generating large numbers of elaborate requests almost instantly makes the underlying question much more serious.

How do we protect the public’s right to know without allowing the cost of exercising that right to divert disproportionate resources away from the public services those rights are intended to protect?

That is a debate worth having. And for schools already operating under considerable

financial and administrative pressure, it is a debate that should not be postponed!