Does a slow answer mean a refusal? Two different kinds of 'no', moving in opposite directions
Our piece on response times measured how long policing FOI responses actually take. The obvious next question is whether the slow ones are slow because they're being refused - stalling as a soft form of no. Cross-referencing the same date-extraction against refusal and exemption language on the same releases gives a real answer, and it isn't the straight line you'd expect.
The headline split
Releases carrying refusal or exemption language ("not held", a cited section, "vexatious") have a 47 working-day median response time. Ones that don't - a clean disclosure - have a 38 working-day median. So refusals are slower on average, a real if modest effect. But look at how often each group actually lands within the legal 20-day limit, and the story flips: refused/exemption releases hit the deadline 25.1% of the time, clean disclosures only 16.9%.
Slower on average, but more likely to be prompt. Both true at once - which only makes sense if "refusal" isn't one thing.
Two kinds of "no"
The pattern that reconciles this: some refusals are fast because they're administratively trivial - a quick check confirms nothing is held, or the requested information is already public, and the response goes out with little delay. Others are slow because they're substantive fights - genuine information exists, someone has to decide what's exempt and why, draft a public-interest justification, and that takes real time. Both get counted the same way in our refusal/exemption tally, and they pull the average in opposite directions: the fast ones lift the within-20-days rate, the slow ones lift the median.
Looking at refusal rate by how late the response actually was, across every niche in our dataset, makes the same shape visible from a different angle:
| Response time | Refusal / exemption rate |
|---|---|
| 0-20 working days (in time) | 41.5% |
| 21-40 working days | 37.4% |
| 41-90 working days | 54.5% |
| 90+ working days | 50.4% |
If slow simply meant "more likely refused," this would climb in a straight line. It doesn't - it dips in the 21-40 day range before peaking in the 41-90 day band, then eases slightly for the very slowest cases. The most refusal-prone territory isn't "very late," it's "moderately late" - plausibly the zone where a body has decided to withhold something but is still working out the justification, rather than either dismissing quickly or eventually caving after a longer fight.
Reading this responsibly
"Refusal or exemption language" is a text-presence signal, not a case-by-case legal outcome - a response can mention a section number while explaining why it doesn't apply, and we count that the same as a genuine withholding. The 455 releases behind this come from the same extraction method as our response-time piece, with the same caveats: pattern-matched dates from free text, sanity-filtered, spot-checked by hand rather than independently audited in full.