Policing FOI Tracker

Why 'policing FOI' here mostly isn't about your local police force

24 August 2026

If you came here expecting FOI logs from the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester Police, or any of England and Wales's other 43 territorial forces, you'll be disappointed — and it's worth explaining why, because it shapes everything else on this site.

GOV.UK's FOI feed is a central government channel

GOV.UK's Freedom of Information release feed exists for departments, executive agencies and arm's-length bodies to publish under the government's transparency guidance. Territorial police forces are operationally independent of central government and, in practice, publish their own disclosure logs on their own websites — not on GOV.UK. The same is true of most individual NHS trusts, which is why our companion NHS & Health tracker has a similar gap for hospital-level FOI.

We checked directly: across all 12,000+ FOI releases GOV.UK has ever published, fewer than a handful of organisations with "police" or "constabulary" in their name appear at all, and by far the largest is the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and its oversight body, the Civil Nuclear Police Authority — a specialist force responsible for policing UK civil nuclear sites, together accounting for well over 2,000 releases in our dataset. That's not a gap in our classifier; it's a genuine feature of what's on GOV.UK.

So what does "policing & justice" mean here?

In practice, this site's coverage centres on:

  • The Home Office — by far the largest publisher in our dataset, covering immigration enforcement, borders, and Home Office policy generally (see our piece on immigration and asylum FOI).
  • The Civil Nuclear Constabulary and Police Authority — an unusually prolific discloser, publishing detailed monthly responses on everything from officer discipline to Taser use to vehicle costs.
  • The Ministry of Justice, HM Courts & Tribunals Service, and the Youth Justice Board — courts, sentencing, and youth justice policy.
  • The Serious Fraud Office and National Crime Agency — specialist investigative bodies.

That's a genuinely rich and under-explored dataset in its own right — specialist policing, national justice policy, and immigration enforcement all get less public scrutiny than territorial policing does, if only because there are 43 separate force websites to check instead of one. But it's a different thing from "UK policing," and we'd rather say so plainly than let the framing overclaim. See our methodology page for the full picture of what is and isn't in scope.