How long does it actually take to get an answer? Better than policing, still short of the legal bar

Public bodies have 20 working days to answer an FOI request. Wherever a response states when the original request or letter arrived, we can pair that with GOV.UK's own publish date and measure how long it actually took. Across 246 health & NHS releases where we could reliably extract both dates, the picture is mixed: clearly better than what we found in our companion Policing & Justice tracker's identical piece on this, but still a long way from full compliance.

The headline number

37.8% of the requests we could measure were answered within the statutory 20 working days - roughly 1 in 3 requests could have their processing time formally justified without an extension, in other words, the majority couldn't. The median response took 22 working days, just over the legal limit rather than dramatically over it. That's a real difference from policing & justice, where we measured a 44 working-day median and only 22.4% compliance - health bodies in our dataset are, on this measure, noticeably closer to the law than policing bodies are.

We extracted these dates the same way across both trackers: searching response text for an explicit statement of when the original request arrived, pairing it with the actual publish date, and discarding any pair where the gap was negative or over a year (almost always a sign we matched the wrong two dates rather than a genuinely multi-year-open case).

Where the data gets thin

The bulk of our reliable measurements - 198 of the 246 - fall in 2015 to 2017, where the picture is fairly stable: 39-53% answered in time, median 20-21 working days. Outside that window, sample sizes drop sharply (as few as 1-4 releases in some years), and a single slow or fast outlier can swing the percentage wildly. We're not reporting a year-by-year trend for health the way we did for policing, because with this few data points outside 2015-2017 it would look more precise than it is.

How this compares to the official picture

The Cabinet Office publishes its own annual Freedom of Information statistics for the 41 major central government bodies it formally monitors: 87% answered in time in 2020, 88% in 2021, 86% in 2022, 81% in 2023. Our figure sits well below that, and the gap has an honest explanation rather than a scandalous one - the Cabinet Office's cohort is a curated list of well-resourced departments, while our dataset spans everything GOV.UK's health-related FOI feed has published since 2009, including smaller bodies that were never part of that monitored list. Our extraction also only works on responses that explicitly restate a date, which may itself skew toward the slower, more caveated end of real responses.

The regulator's own recent actions point the same direction as our numbers, even if not at the same organisations: in December 2025 the Information Commissioner's Office began requiring councils specifically to submit action plans reaching 90% timeliness, after a 40%+ rise in FOI complaints in a single year. That's not about health bodies, but it's the same regulator responding to the same underlying pressure - request volumes outpacing the resources authorities have to process them - that our own numbers are picking up here.

Reading this responsibly

Treat this as an informed estimate, not an audited statistic. Dates were extracted by pattern-matching free text, not read from a structured field either GOV.UK or the responding body provides, and we haven't had every extracted pair independently verified - only sanity-checked against a random sample by hand. The comparison to policing & justice, measured identically on the same underlying method, is the more solid finding here; the comparison to the Cabinet Office's differently-measured national figure is directional context, not a like-for-like benchmark.