Bigger requests get refused far more - and health is where the effect is strongest
Counting how many numbered sub-questions and question marks a request's documentation contains gives a rough, honest proxy for complexity - not a perfect one, but a real structural signal. Across every release we can measure this on, more complex requests are refused more often and take longer to answer. Health & NHS is where that pattern shows up most sharply.
The overall pattern
| Complexity | Refusal / exemption rate | Median response |
|---|---|---|
| No lists or questions | 16.1% | 33 working days |
| 1-2 sub-parts | 21.1% | 35 working days |
| 3-5 sub-parts | 22.3% | 39 working days |
| 6+ sub-parts | 30.8% | 59 working days |
A six-part request is refused roughly twice as often as a plain one-line question, and takes nearly twice as long to answer. That's not a surprising shape in the abstract - more moving parts, more chances for one part to hit an exemption, more work to review before responding - but it's the kind of thing that's easy to assume and rarely actually measured.
Health shows the steepest climb of any niche
| Complexity | Health & NHS refusal rate |
|---|---|
| No lists or questions | 23.5% |
| 1-2 sub-parts | 26.7% |
| 3-5 sub-parts | 38.1% |
| 6+ sub-parts | 58.1% |
Health bodies start above the dataset-wide baseline even for simple requests (23.5% versus 16.1% overall), and the climb from there is steeper than anywhere else we measured - by the six-plus bucket, well over half of complex health requests carry refusal or exemption language. A plausible reading: multi-part health requests often ask for patient-level or service-level data broken down several ways at once, which is exactly the kind of request most likely to brush against Section 40 personal-data protections the more granular it gets - consistent with what we found in our piece on why patient privacy, not security, drives health refusals. The more ways you ask to slice the data, the more likely one of those slices identifies someone.
Our companion Policing & Justice tracker found the opposite shape at the complex end of its own scale - worth reading alongside this if the contrast interests you.
Reading this responsibly
Complexity here is a structural proxy - numbered list items plus question marks, counted across the whole release text - not a judgement of how hard a request actually was to answer, and it isn't reliably isolated to just the original request wording versus the rest of the document. The 6+ bucket for health (105 releases) is smaller than the equivalent policing bucket, so treat the exact 58.1% figure as indicative rather than final. "Refusal or exemption" is the same text-presence signal used throughout this site: a document mentioning an exemption isn't necessarily one where it was the operative reason for withholding.