Does pushing back on a refusal actually work? We can only partly answer that

Every FOI response includes a standard notice that you can ask for an internal review if you're unhappy with the answer. Most people don't. We wanted to know, for the ones who do, whether it actually changes anything - and the honest answer is that we can only partly tell.

Getting the measurement right took two attempts

Our first pass at this searched response text for the phrase "internal review" and found it in nearly a third of everything we track - which turned out to be almost entirely false positives. Nearly every FOI response includes a standard appeals-procedure paragraph explaining how to request a review, regardless of whether anyone ever did. Searching for that phrase mostly just measures how universal the boilerplate is, not how often anyone used it.

Fixed properly - requiring language that shows a review actually happened ("request for internal review of...", "you have requested an internal review", a release specifically titled as a review response) rather than the generic rights notice - the real rate is 2.2% of everything we track (504 releases). That's a small enough share to suggest most people accept the first answer, but a large enough sample to trust as a real number.

What the reviews actually decided

Here's where we have to be honest about a limit rather than paper over it. Real review verdicts turn out to use varied, often legalistic language - one genuine "upheld" decision we read in full never uses the word "upheld" at all, reasoning instead through a formal public-interest balancing test. We can confidently classify an outcome either way in only 14 of the 504 review releases we found. That's too small a sample to report as a real statistic, and we're not going to dress it up as one - of those 14, more leaned toward the decision being changed than upheld, but with a sample that size, that's an observation about 14 documents, not a finding about how reviews generally go.

Reading this responsibly

"Genuine review" here means language suggesting a review actually took place, not just the presence of the standard rights notice - a real methodological fix made partway through this analysis, documented rather than hidden, since the first attempt would have overstated how often people push back by more than tenfold. The 504-release mention rate is solid; the outcome split is not, and we're reporting that limitation as the finding rather than forcing a headline number from 14 documents.