Policing & Justice FOI Tracker
What UK police forces and central government are asked about policing, courts, prisons and immigration — and how they answer.
An independent tracker and analysis of Freedom of Information requests to the UK's police forces, the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, courts, prisons and immigration enforcement, built from GOV.UK's public disclosure data and individual requests via WhatDoTheyKnow.
5,908
FOI releases tracked
77
Organisations covered
10
Topics
1 Sept 2026
Latest release
Volume of FOI releases over time
20042026
Latest analysis
- Bigger requests get refused more - except in policing, where they don't
Across the dataset as a whole, refusal rate climbs steadily with how many sub-questions a request has - simple requests refused 16% of the time, six-part ones 31%. Policing is the one niche that bucks its own trend at the complex end.
- Does pushing back on a refusal actually work? We can only partly answer that
2.2% of every release we track is a genuine internal review - a requester formally challenging the original decision. What that review actually decided is legible in only a small fraction of cases, which is itself worth being honest about.
- Does a slow answer mean a refusal? Two different kinds of 'no', moving in opposite directions
Cross-referencing response speed against refusal and exemption language across 455 policing FOI exchanges reveals a split, not a straight line: quick, clean 'not held' dismissals pull one way, slow substantive fights pull the other, and the middle - not the slowest cases - is where refusal is most likely.
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