Legal cases
Seven appeals at the First-tier Tribunal, dozens of ICO complaints, and a toolkit that tries to encode the craft.
Freedom of information is how a private citizen makes the state explain itself. I’ve spent over a decade using it: seven appeals at the First-tier Tribunal, six of them decided, dozens of ICO complaints, and a long campaign to pull the Private Finance Initiative’s paperwork into the open. At tribunal I represented myself against the Government Legal Department, City law firms and leading counsel. The headline result: disclosure of the full PFI contract for Southmead Hospital, including its financial model — as far as I know, the first ever released into the public domain. I’ve also worked the other side of the desk, as a local-authority FOI compliance officer, which taught me how refusals actually get made. The cases below are fights over the same question in different clothes: whether the public gets to see what it’s paying for.
Appeals and cases
| Wye Valley NHS Trust v ICO Wye Valley NHS Trust · 2013–15 | The papers from the Trust’s dispute with its PFI contractor over fire-safety defects at Hereford County Hospital, refused under the court-records exemption. The Commissioner ordered disclosure, the Trust appealed, and it withdrew shortly before the hearing — the settlement agreement arrived from its solicitors two weeks later, about two years after the settlement itself. |
| North Bristol NHS Trust v ICO North Bristol NHS Trust · 2013–17 | The full PFI contract for the new Southmead Hospital, every schedule and annex, including the financial model the deal was justified on. I represented myself against three legal teams and the tribunal ordered disclosure in July 2016 — as far as I know the first PFI financial model ever released into the public domain, though it took until April 2017 to arrive. Read the judgment → |
| Ryan v ICO Wye Valley NHS Trust · 2015–17 | The Arup and Carillion reports on the fire-safety defects, which the Trust said it did not hold because they sat with its PFI partner. The appeal was allowed in part in April 2017: the Trust had held the Arup report after all, but the Carillion report was confirmed beyond the Act’s reach — the loophole that means the less cooperative the contractor, the better protected the information. Read the judgment → |
| Department of Health v ICO Department of Health · 2016–17 | Eighteen months of the PFI unit directors’ diaries and their correspondence with the parties to a live PFI dispute, to establish whether the unit overseeing these contracts was supporting the trusts or the contractors. The Department called the request vexatious, then apologised for the language; its appeal was dismissed in July 2017 and it was ordered to think again. Read the judgment → |
| Royal Marsden NHS FT v ICO and Rowland The Royal Marsden · 2019–22 | The profit margin on private patient income at the largest NHS private patient unit in England, which the Trust’s own accounts describe as a vital source of support for NHS services. I ran the case at tribunal for CHPI against leading counsel and four senior witnesses; we lost in June 2022, and the Commissioner had switched sides by the end of the hearing. Read the judgment → |
| Ryan v ICO and NHS England NHS England · 2021–23 | The record of how NHS England negotiated the block-booking of the entire private hospital sector with the Independent Healthcare Providers Network in the first months of the pandemic. Refused on cost grounds; I asked repeatedly to speak to someone who could tell me how to narrow it, and never did. The appeal was dismissed in February 2023, the tribunal holding that a public authority discharges its duty to advise and assist entirely in writing: “It is not, in our view, necessary for a conversation to take place either orally or by email.” Read the judgment (on Find Case Law) → |
| Ryan v ICO and NHS England NHS England · 2021–24 | The invoices and validation reports showing what was actually paid to private hospitals under that deal. It ran three years; NHS England answered a narrower question than the one I asked and I only discovered that two years in. The tribunal dismissed the appeal in July 2024, finding that disclosure of the invoices would be likely to assist fraud against NHS England and that the granular cost data in the audit reports was commercially sensitive. Read the judgment → |
FOIAi — encoding the craft
FOIAi is my attempt to encode fifteen years of FOI practice into an open-source toolkit — a set of instructions and reference files that walks someone from scoping a question through research, drafting, tracking and appeals.
Building it forced a sorting exercise: which parts of the craft are rules, and which only look like rules. The mechanics transfer cleanly. Deadlines, the exemption structure, cost-limit arithmetic, the rolling twenty-working-day window authorities use to aggregate requests — all of that can be written down and enforced by checklist. So can the strategic skeleton: each stage, from request to internal review to ICO to tribunal, raises the price of stonewalling, and a system can track that escalation for you.
What doesn’t transfer is judgment. The public interest case has to be felt, not fabricated — a tribunal can tell the difference. Case selection, knowing which fights are winnable before you start them, resists every template. And human sources — a source is worth a thousand pieces of paper — can’t be scripted, only taught as a disposition: the phone call to the FOI officer comes before the request, not after the refusal.
So the tool is opinionated. It refuses requests that lack a genuine public interest justification, forces a fact-check of every claim before submission, and treats the user as someone learning a craft rather than operating a vending machine. Encoding the judgment turned out to be impossible; encoding the standards was not. How the system itself is built — the architecture rather than the craft — is on the Builds page.
Both sides of the desk
I learned FOI as a requester, at the Bristol Cable — a co-operatively owned local paper where the requests were the investigation, not the garnish. Then I went and did the other job. At Huntingdonshire District Council I took over Freedom of Information and Data Protection with statutory compliance sitting at around 50%: half of all legally binding requests going out late. The problem wasn’t effort. There was no system — no visibility over what was outstanding, no way to see a deadline coming before it passed, no triage for the requests that were genuinely hard. I rebuilt the pipeline so every open request was visible against its clock, and sorted early, so the complex and legally exposed ones got the time they needed while routine ones cleared fast. Compliance went to around 95% with the same team and the same volume.
What that job teaches you is that most bad FOI responses are not conspiracies. They are an overwhelmed officer, a badly worded request and a deadline that was missed three weeks ago. Some of them are conspiracies. Knowing which is which is most of the skill, and it is the single most useful thing I brought back to the requester’s side of the desk.
Wider FOI work
Tribunals are the sharp end, but most FOI work never gets near one. Behind the cases above sit dozens of ICO complaints and requests to police forces, fire services, regulators and government departments — plus the research methods that decide what’s worth asking for in the first place. My cases have been cited in parliamentary proceedings and by the Campaign for Freedom of Information. I also teach FOI — details on the Tutoring page.
NEEDED — a Hansard reference or a published Campaign for Freedom of Information URL before the “cited in parliamentary proceedings” sentence can run. NEEDED — you said these last sections are probably for the chop. FOIAi, Both sides of the desk and Wider FOI work are all still here pending your review. The case notes and the email-chain image are gone as instructed; the notes text is preserved incontent/foi-page.md.