Brighton and Hove City Council Sat on Some Freedom of Information Requests for as Long as Seventeen Months. The Regulator Has Now Put It on a Legal Clock, With Contempt of Court Behind It.
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In short. The Information Commissioner issued Brighton and Hove City Council with a formal enforcement notice on 21 September 2026 after the council reported a backlog of 276 overdue Freedom of Information requests in August, a figure that a follow-up spreadsheet put at 288, with the oldest dated 22 April 2025 [1]. The notice requires the council to publish a public action plan within 30 days and to resolve every request that was already overdue by 8 January 2027, or face certification to the High Court for contempt of court [1]. The council has published its own lessons-learned review and says 56 percent of the backlog is already reviewed or cleared [3] [4].
A council that cannot answer a Freedom of Information request within the statutory 20 working days has broken the law in a small way that almost never has consequences. A council that cannot answer hundreds of them, some for the best part of a year and a half, has given a regulator grounds to use a power whose ultimate sanction is a finding of contempt of court. Brighton and Hove City Council is now the second case.
What the notice requires
The Information Commissioner's enforcement notice, reference ENF0988404 and dated 21 September 2026, is also recorded on the Commissioner's own public register of FOI regulatory action [2]. It finds that Brighton and Hove City Council has been in continuing breach of two duties under the Freedom of Information Act 2000: section 1(1), which entitles a requester to be told whether the council holds the information and to be given it, and section 10(1), which sets the ordinary deadline for that response at 20 working days [1]. The notice itself spells out what non-compliance with it would mean: the Commissioner can certify the failure to the High Court, which may then deal with the council "as if it had committed a contempt of court" [1].
The council has two deadlines. Within 30 calendar days of the notice, so by 21 October 2026, it must publish on its website an action plan backed by a lessons-learned exercise identifying the root causes of the delays, covering everything from how requests are logged to how older cases are prioritised and reported to senior management, and must name the senior officer accountable for delivering it [1]. By 8 January 2027, for every request that was already overdue when the notice was issued, it must either provide the information or issue a formal refusal notice under section 17 of the Act [1].
How the backlog was found
The notice sets out its own timeline. On 21 July 2026, having noticed a rise in complaints about the council, the Commissioner asked for an update on its FOI performance [1]. On 6 August 2026 the council reported 276 overdue cases, explaining that its FOI team was operating at reduced staffing capacity but that it had permission to recruit and was using overtime to work through the backlog [1]. At the Commissioner's request, the council then supplied a spreadsheet of overdue cases on 12 August 2026: 288 entries in total, 11 of them dated in 2025 and the rest in the first half of 2026, with the earliest request going back to 22 April 2025 [1]. The Commissioner's own reading of that spreadsheet was that delay had built up at every stage of the process, not just one: cases waiting on an answer from a council service, cases where a response was being drafted, and cases waiting on final sign-off were all represented [1].
The notice is explicit that it is not simply a response to the raw size of the backlog. It credits the council with "great strides" made since the Commissioner's contact began, and says the operational context the council described, reduced staffing, "may explain how delay has arisen" without removing the statutory duty [1]. The Commissioner says plainly why he proceeded anyway: to provide "transparency around these matters and regulatory certainty that the backlog will be cleared" [1].
The council's own account of what went wrong
Rather than contest the notice, the council has published a document it calls a lessons-learned review, framed under its own "Learning Organisation Framework" [3]. It identifies five factors. FOI demand rose 41 percent compared with previous years while the three-officer Information Rights team ran one post short of its planned establishment for eighteen months [3]. But the review does not stop at capacity: it states plainly that "capacity alone does not explain the entirety of performance decline" [3].
The other four causes it names are internal. There was no single, consistently applied process for handling a request from receipt to answer, so officers worked in different ways and effort was not matched to the cases carrying the greatest regulatory risk [3]. Performance reporting to senior managers existed but was not, in the council's own words, "presented in a clear, accessible format", limiting how early problems were spotted [3]. Staff focused on keeping new requests within the statutory clock, which let older overdue cases accumulate out of sight, and the review states the point squarely: "the ICO's primary concern became backlog volume and age rather than headline compliance percentage alone" [3]. Finally, answering a request depends on other council services supplying information on time, and delay there fed straight through to statutory deadlines being missed [3].
The council's own numbers for recovery. The published plan sets three backlog-clearance milestones: 75 percent cleared by the end of October 2026, 90 percent and all "significantly overdue" cases cleared by the end of November, and the full backlog cleared by the end of December 2026 [3]. Labour councillor Jacob Allen, the council's cabinet member for customer services, said the council had already reviewed or cleared 56 percent of the backlog, deployed extra capacity and strengthened oversight, and that it had shared the plan with the Commissioner [4]. All three of the council's milestones fall before the notice's own 8 January 2027 deadline for resolving each individual overdue case [1] [3].
What happens if it slips
An enforcement notice is not the end of the regulator's options, it is close to the end. The Commissioner can issue decision notices on individual complaints and reprimands short of this step; an enforcement notice is reserved for exactly this pattern, a backlog that is large, old and not confined to isolated cases [1]. Beyond it sits certification to the High Court, which Parliament built into the Freedom of Information Act 2000 precisely because the Commissioner has no power to fine a public authority for delay the way data protection law lets the ICO fine for other failings [5]. The council has a right of appeal to the First-tier Tribunal within 28 days of the notice, which would suspend the deadlines if used, and nothing found by this site indicates the council has lodged one [1].
What makes this notice unusual is not the backlog, FOI backlogs at councils are common enough that the Commissioner keeps a running list of enforcement actions against them, but how openly the council has conceded the internal causes rather than leaning on demand and staffing alone [3]. Whether that candour converts into a cleared backlog is a question with a fixed date attached. The council's own target is the end of December. The regulator's legal deadline, with contempt of court behind it, is 8 January 2027.
Sources
- Information Commissioner's Office, Enforcement Notice, reference ENF0988404, Brighton and Hove City Council, 21 September 2026. https://ico.org.uk/media2/lrdlncqa/brighton-and-hove-city-council-enforcement-notice.pdf
- Information Commissioner's Office, "Brighton and Hove City Council", FOI regulatory action record, September 2026. https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/foi-regulatory-action/2026/09/brighton-and-hove-city-council
- Brighton and Hove City Council, "Freedom of Information (FOI): Lessons learned and improvement plan". https://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/freedom-information-foi-lessons-learned-and-improvement-plan
- Sarah Booker-Lewis, "Watchdog orders council to speed up replies to questions", Brighton and Hove News, 6 October 2026. https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2026/10/06/watchdog-orders-council-to-speed-up-replies-to-questions/
- Freedom of Information Act 2000, section 54 (certification of non-compliance to the High Court). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/54