Are students still holding the University to account?

York students' usage of a vital information gathering tool has fallen over the last five years.

The Freedom of Information Act of 2000 allows any person to request any information from a public authority, which must be provided as long as it falls within certain parameters.

Freedom of Information requests (FOIs for short) are a commonly used tool for holding public institutions to account, in particular government departments, local councils, publicly owned companies and educational institutions.

In 2014, York Vision used an FOI to find that university bosses tested on almost 7,000 animals in a year, and more recently FOIs were integral to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s findings on university investments in companies associated with Israel.

Institutions covered by the act must respond to requests within twenty working days, and must provide all the information requested if they carry it, as long as this does not exceed a cost limit (£450), ‘prejudice [read harm] someone’s commercial interests’, or fall under a number of other exemptions. These exemptions can be overturned if the information is deemed to be in the ‘public interest’.

The information released is also still subject to privacy and data protection laws, so may be withheld or rounded to avoid making individuals identifiable.

Vision submitted an FOI request to learn how the tool has been used at the University, and how the institution has been responding.

The number of FOI requests received has fallen by 21% in the last five years, from 612 in 2019 to 483 in 2023. The number of requests is still higher than it was in a Vision investigation in the early 2010s, but the University’s data clearly shows a consistent downturn in usage starting in 2020.

This downturn coincided with the introduction of lockdown measures, but 2020 also saw a fall in the effectiveness of requests that may have contributed to their falling usage in the following years. A higher percentage of requests were denied for exceeding the cost limit than any other year (22.2% compared to an average of about 15%), a higher percentage of requests were flat out refused rather than rounded (39% of all requests), and 2020 was the only full year in the sample that saw no successful appeals against decisions to deny information.

Consistently over the five year period tested, around 50% of requests had exemptions applied to them in some form, with 33.5% completely refused in 2023 (up from 30% in 2021 and 2022 but down from the 2020 high). Of these, only ten were successfully appealed over the entire period.

The University has kept its average response time below the mandated 20 days, but has notably slowed down from its 2019 average of 14 days to 18 in 2023.