An ICO enforcement notice credits Brighton and Hove City Council with "great strides" clearing its Freedom of Information backlog. The council's own figures, from the same week, show the backlog getting bigger, not smaller.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
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In short. The Information Commissioner served Brighton and Hove City Council with a Freedom of Information Enforcement Notice on 21 September 2026, citing continuing breaches of sections 1(1) and 10(1) of the Act (page 1) [1]. The Notice credits the council with having "made great strides" and taken "very positive recent action" (page 5) [1], but the only figures it cites run the other way: a backlog of 276 overdue requests on 6 August 2026 grew to 288 by 12 August (page 4) [1]. The council's own published improvement plan, required by the Notice to set "measurable milestones" (page 6) [1], dates two of them to March 2026, six months before the Notice that required them [2]. Four documented mistakes: three stars.
On 16 September 2026, five days before the Enforcement Notice, the Information Commissioner upheld a complaint against Brighton and Hove City Council over a request for information about West Blatchington Primary and Nursery School, ruling that the council had breached section 10 of the Freedom of Information Act by failing to respond within 20 working days [4]. That single case sits inside a much larger backlog the Commissioner had already been investigating for two months, after an "uptick in FOI complaints" prompted him to contact the council directly on 21 July 2026 and ask for its timeliness figures (page 4) [1].
A backlog that grew while being praised for shrinking
The council's own figures tell a consistent story up to a point. On 6 August 2026 it told the Commissioner it had 276 overdue cases, explained that its FOI function was short-staffed, and said it had obtained permission to recruit and had overtime working under way (page 4) [1]. Six days later, at the Commissioner's request, the council supplied a spreadsheet of its outstanding requests. It held 288 entries, 11 of them dated to 2025 and the oldest received on 22 April 2025 (page 4) [1]. That is a rise of 12 cases, around 4 per cent, in less than a week, during the exact period the council was citing its own remedial steps.
The Notice does not reconcile this. It records that the council had "put in place senior level oversight and made great strides in responding to overdue requests since the recent engagement with the Commissioner", and that the Commissioner "notes this very positive recent action" before proceeding to enforce anyway "to provide transparency... and regulatory certainty that the backlog will be cleared" (page 5) [1]. No figure later than 12 August appears anywhere in the nine-page document to support that assessment. The only numbers the Notice actually cites show the backlog getting worse, not better, in the fortnight before it was written.
Milestones dated before the problem was reported
Paragraph 25 of the Notice requires the council's action plan to "identify clear accountability, measurable milestones and arrangements for senior oversight of delivery" (page 6) [1]. The council met that requirement well ahead of its 30-day deadline: its Freedom of Information lessons learned and improvement plan is already live on its website, naming the Head of Innovation as the senior officer accountable for delivery and setting a strategic objective "to establish a consistent, visible and sustainable Information Rights operating model that... prevents future backlog accumulation" [2].
Inside that plan's second section, "Lack of a consistent end-to-end process created inefficiency", two of the listed actions carry a target date of March 2026: developing "clear guidance on exemptions for FOI coordinators" and exploring "appropriate use of AI and automation to enable effective case management" [2]. Every other action around them is dated October, November or December 2026, or January 2027 [2]. March 2026 falls six months before the Enforcement Notice that required this plan, and five months before the council told the Commissioner it had a backlog at all. A document whose job is to demonstrate "measurable milestones" to a regulator contains two milestones that, read literally, were due before the problem they address had been identified.
A deadline for a backlog nobody re-counted
The Notice's binding requirement is specific: by 8 January 2027, the council must deal with "each information request where the response was outside 20 working days as at the date of this Notice", either answering it or issuing a formal refusal (page 8) [1]. "The date of this Notice" is 21 September 2026. But the only overdue-request figures anywhere in the nine pages, 276 and 288, are dated 6 and 12 August, both more than five weeks earlier (page 4) [1]. Nothing in the document restates how many requests were actually overdue on 21 September itself. A reader checking what the January deadline covers has no current count to check it against, only a figure that was already six weeks stale when the Notice was signed.
The measure with no number attached
The council's plan does commit to tracking the right things. Its fourth section, "Backlog management became disconnected from compliance management", admits plainly that "our internal focus was largely on maintaining headline compliance" while "the ICO placed equal importance on the size, age and management of the backlog" [2]. Its fix is to "create separate performance measures for" three things, including "new request compliance", by December 2026 [2]. Unlike the plan's explicit backlog-clearance milestones, 75 per cent cleared by the end of October, 90 per cent by the end of November, 100 per cent by the end of December [2], no target figure is attached anywhere to the new-request measure meant to stop the backlog recurring once it clears. The plan defines success for clearing the past. It does not define success for the future it says it wants to prevent.
Credit where due
The council did not wait to be chased: it told the Commissioner about its own staffing problems on 6 August, before the Notice, and it published a detailed, named-officer action plan well inside its 30-day deadline. Its self-imposed clearance target, 100 per cent by the end of December 2026, is a month tighter than the regulator's own 8 January 2027 deadline. And its lessons-learned document is unusually candid for this kind of filing: admitting outright that the council had been managing to a headline percentage while an older backlog built up underneath it is the sort of specific, checkable self-criticism this site rarely gets to quote back approvingly.
The claims, tested
| The document's own words | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| The council "made great strides in responding to overdue requests" and the Commissioner "notes this very positive recent action" (page 5) [1] | The Notice's own cited figures show the backlog rising from 276 to 288 cases, around 4 per cent, in the six days before that praise was written (page 4) [1] | No figure in the document supports the claim of improvement; the only numbers given point the other way |
| The action plan must set "clear accountability, measurable milestones" (page 6) [1] | The council's published plan dates two of its milestones to March 2026, six months before the Notice and five months before the backlog was reported [2] | Two of the plan's own "measurable" dates cannot be reconciled with the timeline of the problem they are meant to fix |
| By 8 January 2027 the council must resolve each request overdue "as at the date of this Notice", 21 September 2026 (page 8) [1] | The only overdue-request counts in the Notice, 276 and 288, are dated 6 and 12 August, more than five weeks before the Notice itself (page 4) [1] | No figure in the document states how many requests the binding January deadline actually covers |
| The plan commits to a new "new request compliance" performance measure by December 2026 to prevent recurrence [2] | Unlike the plan's explicit 75/90/100 per cent backlog-clearance milestones, no target figure is attached to the new-request measure anywhere in the plan [2] | The plan defines success for clearing the old backlog but not for stopping a new one |
Verdict
Three stars, from four documented mistakes. Brighton and Hove City Council's case is not the worst of the Freedom of Information Enforcement Notices this site has examined this week: its backlog is smaller than Derby's, its accountable officer is named where Derby's was not, and its own clearance target beats the regulator's deadline by a month. What it shares with the others is a paper trail that does not fully add up. A Notice that praises recent progress while citing only figures that show the opposite, and an improvement plan whose own "measurable milestones" are dated before the milestone-setting problem existed, are not evidence that Brighton and Hove is failing its residents. They are evidence that nobody checked the arithmetic before it was published.
The star score counts four documented mistakes: the Notice credits the council with having "made great strides" and taken "very positive recent action" but cites no figure later than 12 August 2026 to support it, while its own cited figures show the backlog rising from 276 to 288 cases in the six days before that date; the council's own required improvement plan, which the Notice says must set "measurable milestones", dates two of its milestones to March 2026, six months before the Notice itself; the Notice's binding 8 January 2027 deadline covers every request overdue "as at the date of this Notice" (21 September 2026), but the only overdue-request counts anywhere in the document are more than five weeks older than that date, leaving the deadline's actual scope unstated; and the council's plan commits to a new performance measure for new-request compliance by December 2026 with no target figure attached, unlike its explicit numeric milestones for clearing the existing backlog. Four falls in the 4 to 9 band: three stars; the bands are on the ratings page. This piece makes no finding against the accuracy of the council's reported backlog figures themselves, which are detailed and plausible, or against the lawfulness of the Enforcement Notice; the finding is narrower, that the Notice's own praise is not supported by the evidence it cites, and that the council's own accountability document contains dates that do not hold together. Checked directly against the nine-page Enforcement Notice PDF (full text), the council's own improvement plan webpage (full text) and the related ICO decision notice, all fetched 5 October 2026.
Sources
- Brighton and Hove City Council: Enforcement Notice (PDF), Information Commissioner's Office, dated 21 September 2026
- Freedom of Information (FOI): Lessons learned and improvement plan, Brighton and Hove City Council
- Brighton and Hove City Council, Information Commissioner's Office, FOI regulatory action page
- Brighton & Hove City Council (IC-547578-K4G5), Information Commissioner's Office, decision notice dated 16 September 2026