Policing FOI Tracker

The nine-month gap: what a stall in FOI disclosure logs looks like

27 August 2026

Trend charts on this site are drawn straight from GOV.UK's publication dates, month by month. Most of the time they show something unremarkable: a bumpy but roughly continuous stream of releases. Occasionally they show something more striking, and one example is worth calling out on its own.

The numbers

Looking at monthly publication counts in our policing & justice dataset between January 2021 and December 2023:

  • 2021: releases every month, with visible batch spikes in March (79), June (19) and November (53) — consistent with an organisation periodically clearing a backlog rather than publishing steadily.
  • 2022: a similar pattern, including a 52-release batch in May, tapering off toward the end of the year.
  • 2023: October, November and December each recorded exactly one release. Every other month that year recorded zero.

Then 2024 picked back up to 27 releases, 2025 to 57, and 2026 is already at 81 with four months still to go.

What we can and can't say about it

We can only describe the pattern here — GOV.UK's API doesn't tell us why a publisher's disclosure log went quiet, and we haven't contacted anyone to ask, so we won't speculate about the cause. What the shape of the data does tell us is that this wasn't a case of "policing FOI activity dried up" — request volumes recovering strongly in 2024–2026 make that unlikely. It looks much more like a publishing gap: a body that normally discloses in periodic batches simply didn't publish anything to GOV.UK for the best part of a year, then resumed.

Why this matters for reading FOI data generally

It's a useful reminder for anyone using disclosure logs as a proxy for "how much is this body being asked" or "how much is being disclosed": gaps like this can be about publishing cadence, not underlying activity. A monthly trend chart that shows zero isn't necessarily zero requests — it might just be zero publications, with the backlog landing all at once, sometimes over a year later. We keep the raw monthly figures visible on every topic and organisation page precisely so patterns like this stay visible rather than getting smoothed away.