Freedom of Information performance and steps for improvement

FOI request performance 2025

Improving performance

The Freedom of Information Act sets clear deadlines for departments to respond to requests. The National Archives has typically performed well against these expectations, routinely responding to more than 90% of requests on time.

However, since 2020, overall performance levels at The National Archives have dropped below these standards. As a result, the Information Commissioner’s Office has issued aPractice Recommendation to The National Archives. This Practice Recommendation makes several suggestions to The National Archives on how to improve its performance.

The National Archives has responded to this Practice Recommendation through committing to the action plan below.

Explaining The National Archives' current volume of FOI requests

The relatively high volume of FOI requests The National Archives is currently receiving is due to requests for access to historic service personnel records. From February 2021, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) began the transfer of historic service personnel records to The National Archives. This collection consists of over 9.7 million records which will be transferred over a 6-year period. The completion of this transfer will see the number of orderable records at The National Archives almost double in number.

At the moment, the main access route for service personnel records is through making Freedom of Information requests. As a result, The National Archives has seen requests for service personnel records grow rapidly.

To put this into context, before this transfer The National Archives had traditionally received around 3,000 Freedom of Information requests per year.

The National Archives has put in place a specialised team to manage these requests. Due to the pace at which requests have grown, we have increased the size of this team and will continue to keep its resourcing under review.

Freedom of Information improvement action plan

The National Archives plans for improvement, as well as progress updates, can be found below.

Resourcing

Improve service capacity to address FOI request demand

• Proposed action: Recruiting more staff within the team/s responsible for facilitating FOI responses following Executive Team agreement with resourcing proposal.
• Status: Ongoing. Resource levels will be kept under review.

As of July/August 2024, the MOD Access Service Team (AST) were fully staffed and are utilising the dedicated administrative support that joined them in Q3 (see 'Handling for more information'). The FOI Centre carried out recruitment to fill posts vacated on promotion and are carrying one vacancy.

For this financial year, we have reviewed existing budgets and plan to double the access service team from 18 to 38 members of staff. We also plan to recruit more support staff into the project. Recruitment is underway.

Resourcing the MOD AST will form a prominent part of The National Archives’ future spending review bid.

Implement overtime to address specific blockages in FOI process for Service Personnel Records

Proposed actions: From December to March 2023 we will carry out weekend working to address the release of information from these records (redaction). By end of this work, have resolved all pre-October 2022 cases while putting in place resources to sustain a position of having a very limited number of cases that are older than 6-months before eliminating the backlog as the team's capacity increases.

Status: Weekend work is ongoing while all pre-October 2022 cases have been responded to.

As of July/August 2024, we have utilised overtime to support the MOD AST in logging the increasing number of FOIAs received. However, from October onwards the team has been receiving around or over 2000 requests per month. This is much more than average.

Handling

Implement prioritisation approach to address both new cases and backlog

Proposed action: Focus resource on triaging cases to understand more about what is needed to resolve the active cases.

Status: Completed for FOIC, ongoing for MOD Service Personnel Records.

As of July/August 2024, the MOD AST have developed a revised approach for Paid Search requests (open records) to maintain resource between incoming and backlog cases, with a view to improving customer service.

Review existing FOI processes to identify efficiencies

Proposed action: Identify improvements that could be made to the S66 consultation process. We will also review of MoD team processes to deliver handling efficiencies and to ensure clear escalation routes exist where process issues create late running cases.

Status: Completed. We will adopt a continuous improvement approach and where further improvements can be made, we will take this forward.

As of July/August 2024, both teams continued to work on efficiencies to streamline and improve processes.

A key improvement for the MOD AST is fully utilising the case tracking system functionality and removing reliance on legacy spreadsheets. This ceased the duplication of work and saved time.

The FOIC has increased the number of FOI Panels for s66 cases leading to reduction in waiting /time taken on the public interest test.

Regarding Cabinet Office FOI Statistics, amendments made to our case management system (adding fields to match the Cab Stats reporting form) are now completed and should make this collation for Q2 in 2024 (April – June) require far less manual input from FOIC Staff.

Review approach to consultation with departments

Proposed action: Review processes in place with those public bodies that we are required to consult with most often following the receipt of information requests.

Status: Completed and will be kept under review.

As of July/August 2024, the FOIC continue to engage with stakeholders using trackers. Where delays are arising because of stakeholders’ staffing levels, the FOIC are supporting them by prioritising requests requiring their input.

Consider whether the provisions of section 10(4), which allow a longer response time, of FOIA might

Proposed action: In line with the ICO recommendation, explore with other parts of government whether there is benefit in seeking ministerial authority to apply section 10(4) provisions to requests for service personnel records.

Status: Ongoing.

As of July/August 2024, we remain committed to exploring this option and plan to submit this request to Ministers as soon as feasible.

Governance

Improved data capture

Proposed actions include:

• To align data reports from the MOD project and the FOI Centre – specifically to monitor on a month-to-month basis if the active caseload is increasing, i.e., does the volume of cases received exceed the volume of cases resolved monthly (evidence for assessing capacity vs demand and resource needs).
• More work around forecasting – FOI demand and the resource level we require to match this.
• Providing these reports to those that govern the project and FOI Compliance (Steering Committees and Executive Team)

Status: This is completed for the MOD Service Personnel Team and ongoing for FOIC.

This work was completed in January 2024 for MOD AST.

We don’t yet have the same tool for FOIC. We are exploring forecasting/performance models within FOIC, such as D365. Going forward, we need to re-engage with strategic insights for this work.

The data we do capture and use:

• Monthly FOI dashboards, & quarterly CAB stats.
• Corporate request log to monitor number and progress of corporate FOI requests across the internal business areas.
• Case Assignment spreadsheet to monitor number of requests still requiring a case handler – illustrates if the Centre is accruing a backlog.
• Monitoring of s66 FOI Panels with AC/DCMS when submitted/received back.
• ‘Trackers’ of long-running and outstanding requests with certain departments.

In MOD AST data capture includes:

• Resource model.
• Continued data reporting to the MOD project Steering Group.
• Monthly dashboards – Correcting D365 errors and consistent use from the team to create and get more accurate reports.

As of August 2024, data capture remains the same. However improvements have been made to the tracking system, which is managed and audited regularly to ensure data accuracy.

FOI Compliance remains part of the Corporate Risk Register

Proposed action: We will continue to receive senior support and collaboration to address FOI compliance.

Status: Ongoing.

The Final Internal Audit Report was completed on May 2024. We received four recommendations. These are now complete:

1. Risk log to be implemented on delivery of plan
2. Reminders for publication of quarterly review of plan
3. Consideration given to any relevant KPIs
4. Lessons learned – completed in 2024 and linked below.

Transparency

Dedicated web page on MOD Service Personnel Collection Transfer Project

Proposed action include:

• To manage expectations on what records are held and the timeframe for responses (active FOI requests – service level details)
• To provide clear and web searchable information on how to make requests
• To provide a place to include information on the transfer plan – high level details on when records might be held.
• Use FAQs to manage common BAU enquiries, reducing FOI handling.

Status: Completed but consideration is being given to improvements in this area.

As of 2023, we have created a dedicated project page on our website to better explain our management of service personnel records. This includes a revised set of FAQs, clearer guidance to requestors plus clearer web form links. This will continue to iterate and develop.

We are also providing additional detail on timelines to all requestors when they submit an information request.

Publication of the breakdown FOI Statistics by FOI request type

Proposed action: To provide insight into how we are performing in relation to the variety of request types we receive.

Status: Completed – this data can be find above.

Publication of the initial Action Plan

Proposed action: Adding the FOI Improvement Action Plan to our website.

Status: Completed.

We will continue to regularly update this page.