When ‘Many Requests’ may not mean ‘Many Requests’
A troubling pattern emerging in some police section 14 FOIA refusals?
Freedom of Information Act section 14(1) allows a public authority to refuse a request where it considers the request to be “vexatious”.
In principle, that is understandable. Authorities should not be subjected to harassment, badgering or genuinely oppressive conduct. Some responses, less harshly, describe such requests as “burdensome”.
But section 14 is also a difficult refusal for an applicant to test.
A refusal will often say that the requester has made:
- “numerous”,
- “similar”,
- “overlapping”, or
- “repeated” requests,
and that these have created an unreasonable burden on the authority.
The immediate problem is obvious:
- how many is “numerous”?
- how similar is “similar”?
- what exactly is being counted?
- and where is the chronology?
Recent police responses suggest these are not academic questions. A closer examination of three separate examples involving:
- the National Police Chiefs’ Council,
- Gwent Police, and
- Staffordshire Police,
reveals a strikingly familiar structure: request volume asserted, particulars withheld, and different forms of correspondence blended into one wider burden narrative.
That matters. A Freedom of Information request, an Internal Review, a Subject Access request and a complaint are not the same thing. Each serves a different statutory or procedural purpose.
If they are blended together, the result can be a much larger and more damaging impression: the difficult requester, the repetitive applicant, the “bombardment”.
But without dates, subjects, categories and evidence of actual burden, that impression may be very hard to test.
This is not presented as proof of coordination or misconduct. It is a comparative note identifying notable parallels.
If section 14 is to be relied upon, the arithmetic should be transparent.
