Northamptonshire Police closed live Freedom of Information requests for a fire service without telling the people who asked. The regulator says that had no basis in law, and fixed only the backlog, never who let it happen.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
In short. The Information Commissioner served Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service (NFRS) an Enforcement Notice on 5 August 2026 under section 52 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (page 1) [1]. The backlog behind it is small by this site's own recent comparisons, 41 overdue requests against 116 received in 2025/26 (page 4) [1]. What drove the Notice was manner, not scale: Northamptonshire Police (NP), which handles FOI on NFRS's behalf, closed live requests during 2025 without contacting the people who made them, something the Notice itself says "are not in accordance with the legislation" (page 6) [1]. Four documented mistakes: three stars.
A Freedom of Information request does not end because the public authority holding it decides it has. Under section 1(1) of the Act, a request stays live until the requester withdraws it (page 6) [1]. Northamptonshire Police closed a number of requests made to Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service during 2025 anyway, without contacting the requesters first, while acting as the fire service's FOI handler (page 4) [1]. The Information Commissioner's Enforcement Notice, dated 5 August 2026, is addressed to NFRS. Everything it describes as having gone wrong was done by NP.
A small backlog, a bigger problem
NFRS's own numbers are modest next to the backlogs this site has reported on elsewhere this week. As at 21 April 2026, NFRS had 41 overdue FOIA requests against 116 received across the whole of 2025/26 (page 4) [1]. The Commissioner says as much directly: "compared to the size of backlog he has seen in relation to other public authorities, the number of NFRS overdue requests is relatively low" (page 5) [1]. What tipped this into an Enforcement Notice was not volume. It was how part of the backlog had been handled: NP "contacted the Commissioner at a later date to advise that further investigation had resulted in the discovery of an additional 17 FOI requests, that had previously been closed but had now been re-opened" (page 5) [1]. NP's explanation was that these sat on a legacy system that "only a limited number of people have access to," though the same system "is routinely accessed for SARs" (page 5) [1], meaning the 41-request figure NP had already given the Commissioner on 19 June 2026 was already short by at least 17 before the Notice was even drafted.
A decision nobody signed off
The Notice records that NP "confirmed that while the decision on the option chosen was taken at a senior level, it was not formally ratified through any wider senior leadership governance process" (page 5) [1]. That sentence describes a police force closing another public authority's live legal correspondence on an informal, unminuted basis. The Commissioner's own verdict on the practice is unambiguous: "unless a public authority receives confirmation from the requester that they wish to withdraw the request, the request remains live" (page 6) [1]. Annex 1 then sets two remedies: publish an action plan by 5 September 2026, and by 5 February 2027 respond to every request still outside the 20-working-day limit (page 8) [1]. Both steps are framed around "root cause of delays" (page 8) [1]. Neither mentions the ungoverned closures, or requires NP to establish whether more than 17 requests were closed this way, or sets any governance fix for the sign-off process the Notice itself found missing.
The wrong name on the envelope
NFRS is the addressee of this Notice. It is not, on the Notice's own account, the author of the problem. Every operative fact, the closures, the legacy-system gap, the senior-level decision that bypassed governance, belongs to Northamptonshire Police, acting as NFRS's delegated FOI handler (pages 4-5) [1]. NP faces no obligation under this Notice for its own conduct; the fire service it did the handling for does. Northamptonshire Police's FOI function has its own separate, independently documented history of failure. In 2019, the force reported a backlog peak of 656 overdue requests, still sitting at 217 overdue out of 292 open that December [4]. The ICO made formal recommendations on the force's response times in November 2020 [5]. And in September 2026, the same month NP was still working through NFRS's backlog, the force admitted to the police-accountability site Misconduct999 that a separate FOI request, about officers charged with criminal offences, had taken 18 months to answer because it "accrued" into a backlog the force's spokesperson tied to "governance, people, process, records, and demand-management controls" [3]. None of that history, or NP's own admitted and governance-linked backlog running in parallel the same year, appears anywhere in the Enforcement Notice served on NFRS.
The claims, tested
| The notice's own words | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Unilateral closures of live requests "are not in accordance with the legislation" (page 6) [1] | Annex 1's remedy requires an action plan on "delays" and clearance of requests outside the 20-day limit by 5 February 2027 (page 8) [1], with no requirement to establish the full scale of unauthorised closures | The practice is condemned in prose; nothing in the remedy audits how far it went |
| The closure decision was taken "at a senior level" but "not formally ratified through any wider senior leadership governance process" (page 5) [1] | Annex 1's action-plan requirement is framed entirely around identifying the "root cause of delays" (page 8) [1], not the governance gap that let an unratified closure decision stand | The named failure and the required fix do not match |
| NP's 19 June 2026 return put NFRS's backlog at 41 overdue requests (page 4) [1] | NP later found 17 more closed-then-reopened requests on a legacy system it had not originally checked (page 5) [1], and no corrected total is restated anywhere in the Notice | The figure the case is built on was already wrong once, uncorrected in the document that relies on it |
| The Notice is served on NFRS for "continuing non-compliance" (page 1) [1] | Every described act, the closures, the legacy-system gap, the ungoverned decision, was Northamptonshire Police's, acting as NFRS's delegated handler (pages 4-5) [1] | The authority bound by the remedy is not the authority that made the decisions |
Credit where due
NP volunteered the discovery of the additional 17 requests to the Commissioner rather than waiting to be caught out (page 5) [1], and the Commissioner's own framing credits the force for raising its performance information proactively in the course of a related matter (page 4) [1]. Measured against this site's other reporting this week on much larger local-authority and NHS backlogs, NFRS's underlying request volume is genuinely small, and the Commissioner says so in terms, not by implication.
Verdict
Three stars, from four documented mistakes. The scale here was never the issue, and the Commissioner is candid about that. What the Notice documents, and then largely leaves alone, is a police force closing another public authority's live legal correspondence on its own unratified say-so, discovering it had missed some of that correspondence only by chance, and facing a remedy that asks the fire service whose name is on the Notice to fix a backlog rather than asking the force that built it to fix how it decides to close a request.
The star score counts four documented mistakes: the Notice condemns unilateral closures of live requests as having no basis in law but sets no requirement to establish how many requests were closed this way in total; it identifies a closure decision that bypassed senior leadership governance but frames its only corrective action plan around "delays," not that governance gap; the 41-request backlog figure NP supplied on 19 June 2026 was already shown to be incomplete by the later discovery of 17 more closed-then-reopened requests, with no corrected total restated in the Notice; and the Notice binds Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service to the remedy despite every described failure belonging to Northamptonshire Police, acting as the fire service's delegated FOI handler. 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 scale of NFRS's backlog, which the Commissioner describes fairly as relatively low, or against the lawfulness of the Enforcement Notice itself. The finding is narrower: that the Notice's own prose identifies an unauthorised closure practice and a governance failure behind it, then issues a remedy addressed to delay alone, against an authority that did not make the decisions described. Checked directly against the eight-page Enforcement Notice PDF (full text) and independent reporting on Northamptonshire Police's own FOI performance, all fetched 4 October 2026.
Sources
- Enforcement Notice: Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service (PDF), reference ENF0988401, Information Commissioner's Office, dated 5 August 2026
- Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service, Information Commissioner's Office, FOI regulatory action page
- Northamptonshire Police Took 18 Months To Answer FOI Request About Criminality Among Its Officers, Misconduct999, 14 September 2026
- Northamptonshire police still has large Freedom of Information request backlog, Northants Telegraph, 24 December 2019
- Northamptonshire Police told to improve how quickly it responds to requests for information, Northampton Chronicle and Echo, 12 November 2020