Vexatious FOI Requests, Lessons From Scotland For England

By Kieron JH, Founder, The Reasonable Adjustment

Sources

If you submit a lot of FOI requests in England, you eventually meet the same boogeyman: “vexatious”. Not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because it’s the easiest word to reach for when you’re persistent.

A document I keep coming back to is the Scottish Information Commissioner’s briefing on section 14 (vexatious or repeated requests). It’s written for Scotland (FOISA), but the thinking transfers surprisingly well to England because the underlying problem is the same: how public bodies try to manage pressure, and how requesters can keep pressure on without handing them an excuse.

Quick note: this is practical commentary, not legal advice.

Why a Scottish document matters if you’re in England

Scotland has FOISA, England has FOIA. The wording differs, the regulators differ (SIC vs ICO), but the battleground is familiar: public bodies say “too much, too often, too annoying”, and requesters say “it’s a legal right and it matters”.

What makes the Scottish briefing useful is that it’s blunt about how “vexatious” is supposed to be used: evidence-led, contextual, and not as a lazy shortcut for “we’d rather you stopped asking”.

If you do FOI work as a serious routine, this kind of regulator framing is gold because it helps you build requests that survive scrutiny, and it helps you spot weak refusals fast. You’ll see the same dynamics in our own FOI work, whether that’s policing and medical cannabis enforcement here, or how central government quietly invents friction around identity checks here.

The big takeaway: there’s no magic number

The Scottish briefing says it clearly: there’s “no single formula” and no “definitive set of criteria”. Each case needs evidence, evaluation, and reasoning.

That matters for England too, because a lot of “vexatious” refusals quietly rely on vibes. Volume can be relevant, but “you’ve sent a lot of emails” isn’t the legal test.

Translation into practice: if an authority refuses, the first thing you look for is their working. What exactly is the impact, what exactly is the burden, what exactly is the pattern, and where is the balancing against public value? If those answers aren’t there, the refusal is often soft.

The five factors that keep showing up

The briefing sets out a set of factors that often support a vexatious finding. It also warns they’re not a checklist, which is important because authorities love turning guidance into a checkbox machine.

Significant burden, meaning disproportionate time and diversion of resources.
No serious purpose or value, meaning the request is so weak it can only reasonably be seen as noise.
Designed to cause disruption or annoyance, basically a request as a weapon.
Harassing effect, even if the requester claims good intentions.
Manifestly unreasonable or disproportionate, the catch-all that still needs evidence.

In England, you’ll recognise the same themes in ICO guidance and the case law it relies on. The labels vary, but the logic is similar: burden, value, harassment, pattern, motive.

The part requesters should tattoo on their forehead

One of the strongest bits in the Scottish briefing is how it treats follow-up requests that exist because the authority’s earlier answers were incomplete or unclear. There’s an example where the regulator basically says: the applicant kept asking because the previous responses didn’t actually answer the questions properly. That’s not “annoyance”, that’s the requester trying to understand what’s going on.

This is a real world pattern in England too. You ask for A. They answer half of A, plus a paragraph about B that you didn’t ask for. Then they act shocked when you submit a clarifying request for the half they skipped.

Your move is simple: when you submit a follow-up FOI, explicitly anchor it to the gap they created. Make it obvious you’re narrowing, not escalating.

Example line you can reuse:

“This request is limited to the information not addressed in your response dated [date], specifically [one sentence describing the gap].”

This matters just as much for SARs and data rights, where “internal correspondence” is often the missing layer, and the entire point is to see what was said about you behind the scenes here.

Repeated requests: the “reasonable period” trap (and how to avoid it)

The briefing’s repeated request section is useful because it gets practical: repeated means identical or substantially similar, and the timing has to be unreasonable. It’s not “same topic”, it’s “same information”.

The defensive tactic for requesters is to make your differences obvious. If you’re coming back for updated figures, a new time period, revised documents, or information created since the last request, say so plainly. Don’t make them infer it.

Example lines you can reuse:

“This request covers the period [new dates], which was not covered by my previous request.”

“This request seeks any new or amended versions created since [date of previous compliance].”

You can also do this when you’re tracking a story over time and the public body keeps moving. If the question is “what happened, when, who authorised it, and what changed after the fact”, your requests are not repeats, they’re version control. That’s the mentality behind our FOI casefile approach, including the Kim McGuinness Japan trip thread here.

Proactive disclosure: the subtle power move

The Scottish briefing says something that public bodies hate hearing out loud: if they keep getting repeated requests for the same thing, they should consider publishing it proactively.

This is useful in England because it lets you frame your work as a public benefit, not a private obsession. If what you’re asking for is repeatedly requested or clearly has ongoing public interest, it’s reasonable to push for publication.

This also flips the optics. A body that refuses five similar FOIs in a row but won’t publish the material is often choosing friction. That’s not your fault.

A practical playbook for England, built from the Scottish briefing

If you’re submitting a lot of FOIs, you don’t need to go quiet. You need to go sharper. Here’s the request discipline that keeps you on the right side of “vexatious” while still applying pressure.

Batch when it’s the same topic. One request with numbered parts looks calmer than ten separate emails, even if the scope is the same.
Narrow aggressively. Tight dates, named teams, named document types, defined systems. Broad requests create easy “no serious value” arguments.
Write for an external reader. Assume the refusal will be read by an ICO case officer. Make your purpose and scope obvious in two sentences.
Don’t give them harassment material. Keep tone neutral and factual. Save commentary for your articles, not your request emails.
Document the authority’s behaviour. If they cause confusion, delay, or partial answers, keep a clean timeline. Regulators care about context.
When you repeat, justify the change. New time period, updated docs, new decisions, new meetings, new evidence. Make the difference explicit.
Use publication as a solution. If you’re forcing the same disclosures again and again, propose proactive publication. It’s hard to argue with.

If you’re dealing with authorities who try to treat accessibility needs as “extra hassle”, it’s worth keeping the same discipline in mind. “High volume” sometimes just means “the person has to do everything in writing because spoken channels fail them”. We’ve covered that intersection of neurodivergence and formal requests here.

What this means for The Reasonable Adjustment

A lot of our work sits in the overlap between disability rights, public accountability, and data rights. That overlap naturally generates multiple requests, often across multiple bodies, often over time. That’s normal.

The risk isn’t “asking too much”, it’s asking in a way that’s easy to caricature. The Scottish briefing is a reminder that persistence is allowed, but you need to keep your requests clean enough that a refusal looks like what it is.

If you’re doing FOI seriously, your goal isn’t to avoid conflict. Your goal is to make refusal expensive, meaning it has to be reasoned, evidenced, and defensible. That’s how you keep the right alive for everyone else too.

Vexatious FOI Requests, The Scottish Briefing That England Should Read Anyway