Insights
Original analysis drawn from the FOI releases we track — not just a republished feed.
- Bigger requests get refused far more - and health is where the effect is strongest
Across the dataset as a whole, refusal rate climbs steadily with how many sub-questions a request has - simple requests refused 16% of the time, six-part ones 31%. In health specifically, that climb is the steepest of any niche: 23.5% to 58.1%.
- Does pushing back on a refusal actually work? We can only partly answer that
2.2% of every release we track is a genuine internal review - a requester formally challenging the original decision. What that review actually decided is legible in only a small fraction of cases, which is itself worth being honest about.
- Does a slow answer mean a refusal? Not really - not here
Cross-referencing response speed against refusal and exemption language across 246 health FOI exchanges finds almost no relationship between the two - unlike our policing tracker, where the two are entangled in a genuinely strange way. In health, slow mostly just means slow.
- How long does it actually take to get an answer? Better than policing, still short of the legal bar
We extracted real request and response dates from over 240 health FOI exchanges. Just under 38% came back within the statutory 20 working days - meaningfully better than our policing tracker's figures, but still well short of what the law requires and the official record shows nationally.
- Openness comes as a PDF: what format says about how usable this data really is
86% of every attachment across the FOI documents we've indexed is a PDF; genuinely machine-readable CSV is 2.5%. Hospital Trusts & Estates and Medicines & Regulation each get stopped by a different part of the law - one by security exemptions, the other by commercial confidentiality.
- The Friday effect: more releases go out that day than any other, and refusal rates go with them
One day in seven is Friday, but a fifth of every FOI release we track publishes then - and Friday releases carry refusal or exemption language at a meaningfully higher rate than the rest of the week.
- Which organisations actually say no: a league table, not a vibe
Ranking every health body with enough archived text to measure fairly: Public Health England refuses or cites an exemption on over half of what we can read, the Department of Health and Social Care on just over a fifth. The MHRA's weekly publishing habit doesn't translate into a fast one - it has the slowest median response of any body we could measure.
- Patient privacy, not security, is what NHS bodies actually cite when they withhold information
We read the full text of over 2,600 health FOI responses. Health bodies cite the personal-data exemption nearly three times as often as police forces do — and the requests behind that gap trace a clear line from a 2017 data-sharing dispute to today's Federated Data Platform rollout.
- The shape of health FOI, now with 25 trusts added: what changed
Adding individual NHS trusts to this tracker completely reshuffled which subjects dominate. Here's the before and after.
- GOV.UK barely covers individual NHS trusts — so we went and got the data ourselves
GOV.UK's FOI feed almost entirely skips individual NHS trusts. Here's why, and how this tracker closes that gap using individual requests from WhatDoTheyKnow.
- The MHRA publishes FOI responses almost every week — what that reveals about medicines regulation requests
Medicines & Regulation is one of the largest topics in our health tracker, and the MHRA's weekly disclosure rhythm is unusual among the bodies we track. Here's what's in it.